By Graeme Salt
At this time of the year, college counsellors in Korea and around the world shift some of their focus from seniors to junior high school students. Seniors, or those in their final year of high school, will have completed their college applications, and will be receiving offers from universities and working toward their final examinations. The hard work of college application preparation is behind them, and they just need to make good decisions with the offers they receive. It's now the turn of the juniors, or those in their penultimate year of high school, to face the intense period of preparation.
Of course, by now, good schools and students will have been considering and laying the foundations for college applications for a number of years. At Dulwich College Seoul, for instance, we start in Grade 6, but the junior year is when serious decisions and commitments need to be made. For some students, these are the first major decisions they make, with the help of their parents and counsellors. Final decisions need to be made about where to apply (country, institution and degree), and more painstakingly for some, where not to apply, given the significant time and expense required in the college application process. If students do not consider their options in a realistic way based on their needs and interests, they can make some dramatic mistakes, mistakes that can take many years to rectify.
Many parents aspire for their children to attend a top-ranked university, and while this aspiration is often well-placed, on many occasions, it is not. Cutting down college options to a shortlist of prestigious institutions not only limits students' potential opportunities for higher study but so often sets the students up to fail. There is nothing wrong with failure when failure is accepted as a reasonable and potential outcome, but I have seen that it is often not: unrealistic expectations can be placed upon a student without giving the student the safety net of a Plan B.
Surely, parents and others who have a child's best interests at heart would wish for them to live a happy life, with opportunities to find meaningful careers, establish happy family lives and pursue fulfilling personal interests. Of course, it is great when students are admitted to Ivy League colleges and to Oxbridge, as many from our school had done, but there is little joy to be had when a student enters a university that you know they will have neither an enjoyable experience nor be a chance to succeed. While their parents may wear the prestigious institution's sweatshirt with pride for many years after graduation, the students may be miserable, if they realize the life that has been planned for them is not what they wanted and is difficult to leave.
There are so many fantastic universities and degrees in the world that you, dear parents, may have never heard of, but may be the very best fit for your child and, much to your surprise, serve them perfectly now and in the future. So, my plea is for parents to focus on getting their child not into their target school or the best university, but rather into the right university.
Finding the right university requires a realistic acceptance of a student's ability and interests, serious research, as well as expert assistance in the form of excellent counselling. It demands from parents self-reflection, honesty, open-mindedness and wisdom, as well as humility and patience in the face of a waved university ranking table, and confidence that the right preparation and consideration will lead to the right university for their child. May I wish all juniors and their parents the very best of luck in making the right decisions about the right universities in the coming year.
Graeme Salt is the Headmaster of Dulwich College Seoul, a part of the Dulwich College International network of schools. Reach him at Headmaster@dulwich-seoul.kr.
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Of course, by now, good schools and students will have been considering and laying the foundations for college applications for a number of years. At Dulwich College Seoul, for instance, we start in Grade 6, but the junior year is when serious decisions and commitments need to be made. For some students, these are the first major decisions they make, with the help of their parents and counsellors. Final decisions need to be made about where to apply (country, institution and degree), and more painstakingly for some, where not to apply, given the significant time and expense required in the college application process. If students do not consider their options in a realistic way based on their needs and interests, they can make some dramatic mistakes, mistakes that can take many years to rectify.
Many parents aspire for their children to attend a top-ranked university, and while this aspiration is often well-placed, on many occasions, it is not. Cutting down college options to a shortlist of prestigious institutions not only limits students' potential opportunities for higher study but so often sets the students up to fail. There is nothing wrong with failure when failure is accepted as a reasonable and potential outcome, but I have seen that it is often not: unrealistic expectations can be placed upon a student without giving the student the safety net of a Plan B.
Surely, parents and others who have a child's best interests at heart would wish for them to live a happy life, with opportunities to find meaningful careers, establish happy family lives and pursue fulfilling personal interests. Of course, it is great when students are admitted to Ivy League colleges and to Oxbridge, as many from our school had done, but there is little joy to be had when a student enters a university that you know they will have neither an enjoyable experience nor be a chance to succeed. While their parents may wear the prestigious institution's sweatshirt with pride for many years after graduation, the students may be miserable, if they realize the life that has been planned for them is not what they wanted and is difficult to leave.
There are so many fantastic universities and degrees in the world that you, dear parents, may have never heard of, but may be the very best fit for your child and, much to your surprise, serve them perfectly now and in the future. So, my plea is for parents to focus on getting their child not into their target school or the best university, but rather into the right university.
Finding the right university requires a realistic acceptance of a student's ability and interests, serious research, as well as expert assistance in the form of excellent counselling. It demands from parents self-reflection, honesty, open-mindedness and wisdom, as well as humility and patience in the face of a waved university ranking table, and confidence that the right preparation and consideration will lead to the right university for their child. May I wish all juniors and their parents the very best of luck in making the right decisions about the right universities in the coming year.
Graeme Salt is the Headmaster of Dulwich College Seoul, a part of the Dulwich College International network of schools. Reach him at Headmaster@dulwich-seoul.kr.
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