Typically during summer, parents add “Visit College Campuses” to their family vacation itineraries. Many parents will exclaim in rationalizing college visits, “I want to expose my kid to college life, since they don’t have an idea what college actually is.” Translation: parents want to impel their children to start the college application process, sometimes well before their kid, although they may know is their destiny, is ready to begin.
However, in the time of a pandemic, many college campuses remain closed to visitors or have severely curtailed the normal, backwards-walking-enthusiastic-coed-led-group-walk-around-while-gesturing-to-various-buildings-retelling-facts-no-one-will-remember, then hour long admissions officer presentation, where parents and students are mostly listening for the answer to, “How can I be assured an acceptance to _____ (fill in the name of the college where they’re visiting)?”
Instead, college campuses may look more like this:
So, tours may be more like this:
@sarahbkaplan Can you tell I was a tour guide? ##classof2020 ##coronavirus ##collegetour ##Zoom
♬ original sound – sarahbkaplan
Given this reality, parents may now be concerned about how best to motivate their kids in their quest to gain college admissions. Yet, just because students can’t visit a college campus, doesn’t mean they can’t investigate and select colleges where they will be able to further develop their aptitude. The internet is replete with a wide varity of resources to learn more about colleges, from social media, including Tic Tok and YouTube, to virtual resources that colleges produced this past spring.
COVID is temporary, but in order for students to progress and evolve, they still need to seek an institution where they can develop confidence in an inherant ability that will allow them to benefit themselves and others.
