Advice for college/parental involvement from parents of older dcs

[Anonymous]

She doesn’t have plenty of time. I have a college junior who is like this, and when he was a freshman I did as many posters are suggesting and encouraged him to explore his interests and get prerequisites out of the way (these often go hand in hand), but when it was second semester sophomore year, he had no better sense - and how could he really, after having taken intro to econ, basic philosophy, one history class, so on (plus all it takes is one bad prof in your intro to finance class or whatever and if you were already undecided, you certainly aren’t then more drawn to it). And some majors he was locked out of at that point, because he hadn’t built the prerequisites (eg, math - the classes for the major start at Calc 3, so he couldn’t reasonably catch up without turning his last 2 years of college into all math classes, and he wanted to study abroad. So he declared a major that isn’t marketable without a grad degree, simply because when pressed he liked the 2 classes he had taken in that area better than the other intro classes he’d taken. And now he is a junior and has no idea what areas in which he wants to look for internships, etc, when every other junior hit the ground running and locked down their internships in finance, communications, so on.

I regret that dh and I did not encourage DS to treat college more like the way it is handled outside of the US, where you focus pretty quickly. Luckily my younger is doing the engineering track in hs so hopefully will continue with that in college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:She doesn’t have plenty of time. I have a college junior who is like this, and when he was a freshman I did as many posters are suggesting and encouraged him to explore his interests and get prerequisites out of the way (these often go hand in hand), but when it was second semester sophomore year, he had no better sense - and how could he really, after having taken intro to econ, basic philosophy, one history class, so on (plus all it takes is one bad prof in your intro to finance class or whatever and if you were already undecided, you certainly aren’t then more drawn to it). And some majors he was locked out of at that point, because he hadn’t built the prerequisites (eg, math - the classes for the major start at Calc 3, so he couldn’t reasonably catch up without turning his last 2 years of college into all math classes, and he wanted to study abroad. So he declared a major that isn’t marketable without a grad degree, simply because when pressed he liked the 2 classes he had taken in that area better than the other intro classes he’d taken. And now he is a junior and has no idea what areas in which he wants to look for internships, etc, when every other junior hit the ground running and locked down their internships in finance, communications, so on.

I regret that dh and I did not encourage DS to treat college more like the way it is handled outside of the US, where you focus pretty quickly. Luckily my younger is doing the engineering track in hs so hopefully will continue with that in college.

I think that is partly why she is diving into this new major head on: The adviser was very clear that she was already behind, as a freshman! So she feels like going fully into it is the best way to avoid your ds's situation. The one good thing for her is is she were to revert to her original major, she is actually ahead in it at this point and can afford to "lose" this semester exploring this other major completely. My dh's feeling is that she should give it a try, and if she fails, she should fail fast and immediately move on back to her old major or something more similar.