How to Help Your High School Student Set Goals

To your teen, it might seem as if high school is going to last forever. But you know better. Setting goals provides your teens with concrete landmarks to help them along their academic path. Having set goals to follow will give your teens focus and help them build self-confidence.

Here’s a look at the kinds of goals your teen should be setting and why they are important.

• Of Course Those Courses Matter. How can you help make your teen’s academic schedule beneficial to him or her? Keep your teen’s college and career goals in mind when choosing courses.

• Think Ahead to Test Time. Tests are a fact of life for high school teens. Whether dealing with subject tests, mid-terms and finals, or standardized tests, your teen’s high school career will be peppered with test dates. Well ahead of test time, help your teen set up test preparation goals.

• Extracurriculars Are Not Extraneous. Both colleges and employers think extracurricular activities are important because they showcase skills, commitment and responsibility. In addition, these activities benefit your teen by helping to build independence, confidence and experience. Sometimes, they even help your teen figure out a career path. As your teens set goals for the things they would like to achieve outside of school, help them keep their overall schedule in mind, as well as their college plans.

• You Talking to Me? Have your teen talk to the school’s counselor. The counselor can help your teen select courses and narrow down college and career choices. Setting up goals with the counselor provides a clear framework that helps them keep things in focus.

• Hello College, Here We Come! No matter which year of high school your teen is in, college visits should be on your goal list. Freshman year is not too soon to start looking at colleges. In fact, it’s much better to start early, and you can start locally. Visit different colleges of different sizes, with different kinds of campuses, if possible. Different campuses have different “feels” to them, and visiting will help your teen figure out which atmospheres are most appealing.

• Face the Financial Facts. High school means study time for you too. Your goal during your teen’s high school years should be to learn about college costs. That includes learning about financial aid: how it works, what’s available and if your family qualifies for it. It also includes learning about the differences between loans, grants and scholarships. The earlier you learn the ins and outs, the better, because it’ll give you the opportunity to plan ahead. Then, you can sit down with your teen and have a frank discussion about the fiscal facts. Based on that discussion, you can help your teen set realistic college goals.

The more your teens set and meet goals, the more they will realize the benefits and importance of goal setting. How do you help your teens set goals and keep them on track for meeting their goals?

How to Get a Early Start on the College Search

Now that I have successfully sent one child off to college, my friends tend to ask me for college prep and selection advice. Top question — how many schools did you visit, and how did you work it into their busy schedules?

I love watching their faces when I tell them, “Twenty-six schools, seriously.”I know they are thinking, “Isn’t that really overdoing it?” Look, in true mama-says-so fashion, I only do this stuff if it’s going to work out well for me.

“College search” was the single best excuse I have found so far to travel and hangout with my kids.  And because it was all about them, they totally went along with it. (Suckers!) Now, we didn’t wait to start the college visit odyssey in the 11th grade.

Over the last few years, we worked campus visits into vacations, so both of our kids could start to get a mental picture of how big schools differed from small schools. It gave me the opportunity to see what some of these schools, that I only hear about during March Madness, actually look like. We saw Stanford on a San Francisco vacation when my son was in eighth grade, the University of Arizona while we visited Phoenix, and so on. I even managed a spring break business trip in L.A. where I had both kids fly out and we hit USC and UCLA.

It wasn’t until 10th grade Christmas break when we started working in specific college visits, where we officially signed up and listened to the pitches. I made my son do all of the online pre-work to register us for every visit. It proved to be an effective way to gradually transfer his enrollment responsibility from me to him. When we went to visit my family in Dayton for the holiday, we drove from Chicago so we could hit the University of Illinois, University of Dayton, Ohio State and Vanderbilt. Seeing several schools in a short spread was interesting because we could compare the schools and start identifying what “lit” him up and what turned him off.

We also got much better at asking useful questions by listening to other families at the early campus visits.My son went from asking, “Where do you go for good pizza here?” to “Do you offer merit scholarships?” and “How important is Greek life at the university?” Practice does make perfect.

During the spring of his junior year, on long weekends, he and I would cash in my frequent flyer tickets and hit some schools that were high on his list. I also extended an NYC business trip so he could join me to tour Columbia and NYU. He didn’t end up attending either, but we have an epic memory of running the Central Park loop together.

In that critical summer between junior and senior years of high school, I planned a vacation to see multiple schools during one trip. My kids and I went to the Boston area and hit five schools and crushed the Freedom Trail. We visited old friends, learned the train system, ran the St. Charles jogging route and did Boston like crazed tourists. We threw in New Haven and Providence just to round the trip out. On another trip, we took our French exchange student with us to explore the Washington, D.C., Virginia and North Carolina schools.

Ultimately, my son sorted out that he liked schools with a defined campus, an accessible big city and a sports tradition. Oh yes, and he then sorted out the schools that offered the majors and programs that were of interest to him. In the end, he chose based on the major and a well-informed “gut feel” for the school.

Sure, there was a lot of online research that went into the college planning, but nothing — and I mean nothing — beats a good ole road trip to a campus. J Fitzgerald