Reply to General advice for a hardworking, smart kid but without an academic passion?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "General advice for a hardworking, smart kid but without an academic passion?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My junior is hardworking and smart, but doesn't have an academic passion yet. He has ruled out the hard sciences and engineering. He is good at math but doesn't think he wants to focus on it. Writing is more of a struggle but one he works at and has gotten better at. He is extremely social and when he takes career tests, they point him towards working with people such as coaching, teaching, or politics. He is also interested in business but not exactly sure what that means...

Academically, he'll apply to UVA and W&M but they're in our "low reach" category...other schools on the list are Villanova, Wake Forest, Pitt, Delaware...also considering playing his sport at a Division 3 school such as Franklin & Marshall or Wesleyan.

In general, what advice do BTDT parents have for a kid like this in the college search? Should we be drilling down on schools' general education requirements to make sure he'll get a broad range of classes before declaring a major (although I'd imagine all colleges have that)? Should we be digging into how strong freshman/sophomore year advising is (my older son went to Syracuse with a declared area of interest but I was not impressed with their freshman advising tbh). Are there schools that make more sense or less sense for a kid like this?

thanks.[/quote]
Have him intern at a small business. Let him see what the day to day of running one is like. Find a school with good professional fraternities, or some similar constructive social outlets. Let him major in business, but make sure he reads books on networking, succeeding in college (e.g. how to win at college by Cal Newport), books on how to succeed as an employee/intern (promoted by Bozi Dar), etc.

Interns and consultants have a lot in common in that no one in the host business really knows what they're meant to do, they just need to get results/solutions that look good to management, so books on consulting can often benefit interns in non-consulting positions.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics