We’re so pleased to be partnering with Grown & Flown and NACAC Virtual College Fairs on a series of live discussions intended to support parents of high school juniors (as well as sophomores and first-year high school students, too) as they begin to contemplate and embark on the college process.
Join us on the Grown & Flown Facebook Page, Feb 23, 8 PM ET for Part I
We bring to this series more than a half-century of combined experience and expertise from multiple vantage points. For more than a decade, Eric J. Furda was the Dean of Admissions of the University of Pennsylvania — and previously the Executive Director of Admissions at Columbia University — before joining the college counseling staff at a high school in Philadelphia earlier this year.
Jacques Steinberg is the New York Times best-selling author of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College and is a former national education correspondent at The Times, where he worked as a journalist for 25 years.
Last fall, we joined forces to co-author a book, The College Conversation: A
Practical Companion for Parents to Guide Their Children Along the Path to Higher
Education, which was published by Viking. In it, we walk parents (as well as mentors
and other adults) through five, extended conversations that they might consider having
with their children or other young people in their lives beginning in the lead-up to the
college process, and continuing throughout each step along the way. We even include
conversation starters on the transition to college through the end of the first year.
We call the first set of conversations “Discovery” — and we see them as an opportunity for adults to encourage young people to look inward (no easy task, we know) as they begin to reflect on themselves and to consider the specific attributes of a college or university experience and environment that might have the most appeal.
Our first session — in what we are imagining as the Grown & Flown equivalent of
virtual office hours — is titled “The College Search: Looking Inward.” It will be live on
Feb. 23 beginning at 8 PM ET, on the Grown & Flown Facebook Page, and we invite you to come with your questions.
We’ll have a bit more to say below about what we have in mind, including a short, optional activity that participants might consider doing in advance.
Live Series on College Admissions on Grown & Flown
We include more than a dozen exercises in the book. The first is titled “Helping
Your Child Imagine Their (Ideal) College Campus.”
We invite you to consider giving this activity a try, ideally in partnership with your child, before we meet on Feb. 23. All you need are a few, old-fashioned index cards. (Alternately, you can wait until after we’ve met and talked you through it.)
Session 1: “The College Search: Looking Inward”
Tuesday, February 23, 8 PM ET
Session 2: “The College Search: Building A College List”
Wednesday, March 10, PM ET
Session 3: “The College Application” (Including the Essay)
Tuesday, March 23, 8 PM ET
More to Learn:
NACAC Virtual College Fairs
Here is where you and your teen can learn more about and register for the FREE NACAC Virtual College Fairs. Dates are as follows:
Virtual College Fair Dates
- Feb 28 — Sunday, 1-7 pm ET — 600 exhibitors
- March 7 — Sunday, 1-5 pm ET — STEM — 250 exhibitors
- March 16 — Tuesday, 4-8 pm ET — Performing and Visual Arts — 200 exhibitors
- March 21 — Sunday, 1-7 pm ET — 600 exhibitors
- April 10 — Saturday, 3-7 pm ET — Western US — 400 exhibitors
- April 20 — Tuesday, 3-7 pm ET — Southeastern US — 400 exhibitors
- May 2 — Sunday, 1-7 pm ET — 600 exhibitors
