College Visits in Your Own Backyard

I live next door to Lewis & Clark College. I sometimes think of their beautiful grounds as an extension of my backyard.

One of the tasks I assign to all sophomores and juniors who work with me is to visit a small, medium and large college. I want them to experience the differences, rather than making a judgment based on hearsay. Fortunately, we have small, medium and large college options within easy driving distance of Portland.

For small, I recommend students check out Lewis & Clark, Reed, Willamette, Linfield or University of Portland. For a medium, I suggest Western Oregon, Gonzaga, or Western Washington. For large, the student could try out University of Oregon, Oregon State, Portland State or University of Washington.

When it comes to college, size matters, and it is important for a student to learn about his/her preferences. Although I sometimes encounter resistance from students who claim they don't want to look at anything so close to home, I explain that if they tell me they love X local college I can tell them about some similar colleges in alternate geographies.

A family without discretionary funds probably shouldn't spend money to travel across the country to look at schools. That same $1,000-$2,500 could be saved for college tuition, or reserved until April of senior year when the student has acceptances and financial packages in hand. That's a smart time to visit.

A Computer, Not a Person, May Be Grading Your Essay

My favorite part of college counseling is guiding students through the essay process. No doubt my background as a high school English teacher, corporate communications director and magazine editor predispose me to like the writing aspect of the work. I am a huge fan of storytelling and secretly harbor a fantasy of getting my PhD with a dissertation about the effectiveness of sharing personal stories in corporate environments. But I digress. My blog post today is to express mixed emotions related to the controversy surrounding computer graded essays.

EdX (the MOOC partnership between MIT and Harvard) announced an essay grading software system that will instantly grade student papers, provide feedback, and allow the student to immediately rewrite for the chance to improve the grade. Brilliant academics are facing off on both sides of this issue.

There is certainly data that proves most people learn better with instant feedback. And I understand that it is unrealistic to provide personal  feedback if you are the professor of a MOOC that has 300,000 enrolled students. The financial model for keeping the cost of MOOC courses low (or free) means there must be an automated grading system and it's valuable to include writing rather than just multiple choice tests.

Since I read about 500 essays each applications season, I can personally attest to the fact that some high schools students are excellent writers, and others have a ways to go before their writing is college-level. Whichever end of the spectrum a student starts on, it saddens me to think that personal mentoring--heated discussions at the local coffee bar or in the professor's office--might be replaced by an artificially intelligent piece of software. My daughter's on-campus job as a writing tutor would be a relic of a bygone time.

What disturbed me most about the New York Times article was the ending (excerpted below).

"With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments...critics of the technology have tended to come... from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could. There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

I stopped being a high school English teacher when my classes became too large for me to give meaningful feedback on writing assignments. I believed a student should write an essay each week, but I couldn't comment on 225 essays per week. If I couldn't do the job up to my standards, then I needed to find another job. The article writer implies that public college professors are all in the same situation I was in as a public high school English teacher. I hope not. While computerized essay grading may become acceptable for MOOC courses, I hope it will not become the standard used at colleges where students are in actual (rather than virtual) attendance. If it does, more students (and their parents) will question the value of attending college in person rather than via the internet.  

A Broken Lawnmower and Learning Opportunities

Saturday I went into Bridgetowne Hobbies & Games. My mission was to buy my son Vic some sort of kit that he could put together in his experimental science class that would help him figure out if he is interested in a career as an electrician.

The spry store owner, Bill Daemke, graciously spent time describing multiple options, but they weren't the sort of get-your-hands-really-dirty-experience I was hoping to find. Then Bill started describing his experimentation as a teenager repairing broken mechanical objects and I got excited. Bill graciously offered to bring in a broken lawn mower and give it to me at no charge for my son to repair or dismantle.

Since Vic had been anticipating something like a remote-controlled helicopter I wasn't sure how he would react to the news that he was getting a broken lawnmower instead. I was thrilled when he got really excited and started describing ideas for using the lawnmower motor and wheels to make a mini-car. He even sketched some ideas and did internet research over the weekend!

Sometimes students I work with think that learning opportunities are confined to school and more traditional didactic methods. I encourage them to pursue passions outside the class--learn to make pasta from scratch,  try out geocaching, take apart a broken radio and figure out how it works.

Whatever creation Vic makes with those lawnmower parts, I'll deliver a picture of the end result to Bill, so he knows that his infectious attitude about mechanical innovation is spreading!

My Goal: To be the Thomas Menino of Independent College Counselors

Often my students answer an essay prompt about a person living or dead they would like to meet. I hadn't thought about it much myself until today when I read an article in the NY Times about Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino. He is now at the top of my "want to meet" list. Excerpts from the article might explain why.

“I am here with the people I love, to tell the city I love, that I will leave the job that I love,” Mr. Menino, 70, the city’s longest-serving mayor, told the standing-room-only crowd of well-wishers. He said essentially that he was not up to the job, at least not the way he wanted to do it. After illnesses last year that left him hospitalized for two months, he said he could not keep up his schedule of attending every ribbon-cutting, every dinner for a new homeowner, every school play — the small events that filled his days and threaded him to the city’s residents.

The Globe poll affirmed an eye-popping tidbit from previous polls -- that Mr. Menino had personally met more than half of Boston's 625,000 residents, an astounding feat for the chief executive of a major American city.

My personal goal is to be the "Thomas Menino" of independent college counselors. In the past few weeks I have watched students at the state dance competition, the national qualifying tournament of Oregon speech and debate students, and at spring jazz and choir concerts. I may not fit in every school play, every sports competition, every awards dinner, and every graduation party, but I tell students that if they invite me, I will do my best to be there. Why? Because I love the students I work with - who they are now and who they will become - and it is one way for me to show I care and appreciate the trust that they and their parents have placed in me. I have the best job in the world!

Making a College Choice: Go With Your Gut Instinct

Hopefully you did your homework before you decided which colleges to apply to. Whether you applied to three schools or nine schools, every school on your list is a good academic match. It has the programs that interest you and top-notch professors. My point is that you did the intellectual decision-making at the time of application. That means you have all good choices!

This is the week when I get a lot of calls from students and parents asking for help choosing between great options. My advice is pretty consistent. Eliminate all options that are not within your financial comfort zone. Now narrow the remaining options to three. Your criteria could be financial or geographic or any other reason that makes sense to you. Try to reduce the scope of your decision to three choices by April 1. Three seems to be a reasonable number that most psyches can juggle.

Now is the hard part for all my brilliant students to hear. It's no longer an intellectual decision. You are picking between three options that all make sense and you need to trust your gut instinct. If you can visit each of the three that is optimal (even if you saw them before), but I realize that is not possible for every student. Since you are making a decision that includes social, emotional and cultural criteria, now is the time to use subjective tools. Join the Facebook group for admitted students. Chat with current students on College Confidential. Imagine your prospective peers as your future best friends. Spend an overnight in the dorms. Sit in on a class. Talk with a professor, and if you can't do that in person ask one to Skype with you. Do you feel valued? Picture yourself there and happy for the next four years. Your college experience will be as  fabulous as you make it, so listen to your heart and pick the community that feels right!

F.W. Olin College of Engineering : Think Like an Engineer

It's been a good press week for my daughter's soon-to-be-alma-mater Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. There was a segment on WGBH-TV's Greater Boston profiling how much the school has achieved in just ten years. BostInno published an article: How Greater Boston’s Most Overlooked College Has Revolutionized Education. Product design collaboration between Olin students and area seniors was featured in a Boston Globe article about Engineering for Humanity. As a parent, do I like it when my daughter's school choice is validated by the larger community? Absolutely! Yet, my fondness for Olin runs much deeper.

My daughter wasn't the typical engineering student. She chose to go to engineering college despite the fact that she knew in advance she probably wouldn't work as an engineer. Her rationale was that she wanted to think like an engineer, since problem solving is needed in every profession. Through Olin and its partners Wellesley and Babson, she has had intellectually stimulating classes, inspirational professors, and most importantly, a circle of supportive friends I admire. When the world is run by young people like her classmates, I will feel extremely confident about our future.

Oregon Third Worst Slasher in the Nation

According to the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities, Oregon slashed budgets for public higher education by over 46% since the recession. Ouch! That makes us the third worst "slasher" in the nation - not a third place we should feel proud of.

This is a good moment for activism. Send the linked graphic to your state representative and express your outrage. Maybe he or she will get as mad as I am and do something to reverse this despicable trend.