Preparing for Success in College and Beyond (eBook)

A Pediatrician's Guide for Teens and Parents

MD Louis Hempel (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
186 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-2014-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This book is a primarily a guide to help high school students prepare for becoming successful college applicants. It is also written to help high school seniors and entering college students prepare for ongoing success once they arrive on campus. The foundation of success for both high school and college students is based on teaching them to learn strong communication skills, and to take care of their mental and physical health. Once that strong foundation is built, the book will then share numerous suggestions of activities that high school students can participate in outside the classroom. There is one chapter dedicated to those students who would like to consider becoming college athletes. The combination of academic achievement and extracurricular involvement will help build a high school resume that will provide meaningful content for college applications and essays. For high school juniors and seniors there are chapters devoted to researching potential college majors, financing college, and then targeting those colleges and universities that are best fits for campus visits. For those students who are entering college there is a chapter devoted to establishing a disciplined approach to academic study, which includes avoiding many common pitfalls. The final chapter is devoted to the author telling about his journey through college to his admission into medical school. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate to students that their path to success will often require navigating around many obstacles along the way.

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This book is written to help high school students prepare for becoming successful college applicants. It is also written to help high school seniors and entering college students prepare for ongoing success once they arrive on campus. The book is written by Dr. Louis Hempel, who has practiced general pediatrics in Metro Atlanta for over 30 years. During his long career, he has interacted with thousands of high school and college students whose families come from all over the world. The foundation of success for both high school and college students is based on teaching them to learn strong communication skills, and to take care of their mental and physical health. Students with ineffective communication skills; poorly managed mental health disorders such as ADHD, anxiety, or depression; alcohol or substance abuse problems; or poor dietary, exercise, and sleep habits will have huge barriers to future success. Once a strong foundation has been established by addressing those potential barriers, the book will delve into suggestions for extracurricular involvement outside of the classroom. There is one chapter dedicated to those students who would like to consider becoming college athletes. It is the combination of academic achievement and involvement in extracurricular activities that will help create a high school resume that will provide meaningful content to be used on college and university applications and essays. With the help of this guidebook, the author hopes that those applications and essays will have a better chance to stand out amongst those submitted by thousands of other students. There are several chapters for high school juniors and seniors in the later part of the book. Those chapters will help students learn to research which colleges and universities they should target for consideration, based on their academic abilities and career ambitions. There will be suggestions on how to plan campus visits, how to look realistically at the economic realities of various career paths, and suggestions on how to approach financial planning for college. For those students who are entering college there is a chapter devoted to establishing a disciplined approach to academic study, which includes avoiding many common pitfalls. The final chapter is devoted to the author telling about his journey through college to his admission into medical school. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate to students that their path to success will often require navigating around many obstacles along the way.

Textauszug

Chapter One:
How to Build a High School Resume
for Successful College Admission

For most adults, the concept of building a resume is something that begins after high school. For college students, that means having a strong academic record, finding internships or other real-world opportunities to gain experience within their desired field of interest, and preparing themselves to become graduate school or job applicants as they finish their undergraduate education. Beyond getting our first jobs out of college or graduate school, we are programmed to think about how to continue building on that resume during our work years so that we can be promoted into positions of higher authority and higher pay as our careers progress.

It is my opinion that we parents need in instill the concept in our children that they should build their resumes beginning in high school as they prepare to become future college applicants and college students. We also need to be aware that, from the standpoint of application to college, this resume will be mostly built during the freshman, sophomore, and junior years of high school. By the beginning of the senior year of high school, the college-application season has opened. To have the best chance of gaining acceptance into the most competitive colleges and universities, these applications will generally need to be submitted within the first few weeks of the senior year. Sometimes an application for binding early acceptance can show strong interest in a particular institution and help a student stand out against thousands of other applicants.

The most important point of this book is to have parents sit down with their high school students on a regular basis through those years to help them develop a resume that is purposeful and comprehensive. It needs to be more than just reminding them that they need to make good grades and find an extracurricular activity to become involved in. The competition to enter the most desirable, and often highest paying careers will begin with the competition to become accepted into a college or university that does a great job of preparing their students for those careers. The most successful adults usually have very well-rounded resumes. They are competent in their fields of expertise, not only because they are technically proficient but also because they take care of themselves emotionally and physically, and they are good communicators and well-rounded citizens. The building blocks of this process will be touched on in this chapter, and then expanded upon in the chapters that follow.

Of course, the foundation of any successful college application is the academic record achieved during the high school years. By the end of middle school, most students will have had the opportunity to show their academic potential, and this should be viewed realistically as the high school curriculum is planned out for each individual student. There will be many students who are simply not capable of filling up their semesters with numerous Advanced Placement (AP) and honors-level classes during high school. Most of us are aware of the parents who push their children in athletics, music, or other extracurricular activities to a point that is unhealthy, and we need to be mindful to not make the same mistakes when it comes to pushing our own children academically. There is a fine line between offering encouragement and emotional support for strong students who have the ability to handle a highly challenging academic load, and mentally breaking down those who simply do not have the innate ability to do AP-level work. A high school student of average intelligence who is supported by their parents according to their own abilities can be just as happy in their career as the biomedical engineer who graduates from MIT.

Determining the academic potential of any given high school student is more complicated than simply measuring IQ. There are many other factors that need to be considered and addressed. Emotional health and physical health play a huge role in academic success or relative failure. Unrecognized attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, or depression can devastate a high school academic record. Chapter Three includes an in-depth discussion about managing mental health problems. Physical health is often under-recognized as a contributing factor of a student’s high school academic achievement. During my career as a pediatrician, I have seen several students who were struggling to cope with school because they had undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea or simply because they were tired and sluggish all day related to obesity and lack of exercise, or because they were so underweight that they were borderline malnourished. Occasionally we will find students who are struggling in school because they have been suffering from undiagnosed thyroid disease, celiac disease, or other medical diseases that affect their ability to concentrate on their studies. The point here is to make sure that your high school students are seeing their primary care medical providers on a regular basis to address any mental or physical health problems as early as possible. I would especially encourage taking them for an annual wellness physical, as in my experience it is during these visits that many of these problems come to light for the first time.

Building a framework for academic achievement in high school involves many other components as well. As parents, we need to take advantage of parent-teacher conferences when they are offered. Students need to be encouraged to take advantage of teacher office or open-house hours that may be available to them at the end of the school day. They should ask questions about their studies during the whole semester, and not just in the days immediately before major tests. Sometimes there may be a need for tutoring in some subjects, either within the school system or privately. Our students need to think about establishing friend groups for their major courses who can serve as encouraging study partners. As high school progresses, be sure to take advantage of the guidance counselors who serve as advisors for each student as they prepare to look at colleges that are best targeted to their academic interests and achievements.

An important, but often controversial, component of the high school academic record is achievement on standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT. In recent years, these tests have been de-emphasized or even eliminated by some colleges and universities as a required part of the application process. There are some who feel that these tests may be culturally biased or have other innate flaws that can tarnish an otherwise capable student. I personally have mixed emotions about these tests. I am not trained as an expert in academics, so I will not try to argue against the points that have been made about the flaws in these tests. On the other hand, I do think that eliminating these tests as a requirement for college acceptance may simply end up delaying the competition for acceptance into graduate school or high-level career placement beyond college. I do not believe that most medical, law, or business schools are going to drop the requirements for their applicants to take the MCAT, LSAT, or GMAT standardized tests anytime soon. And while it is true that students who do relatively poorly on the SAT or ACT compared to other accepted students at their colleges or universities may do just fine in the long run, I do wonder if many of those students will find themselves in over their heads and struggle. It is possible that many of these students will find that they would have been better off attending schools that are more benchmarked for their standardized test score results.

Through my many years of experience as a pediatrician and interacting with hundreds of teenagers, I have become convinced that one of the greatest detriments to them living up to their full potential is the failure to develop strong face-to-face conversational skills. Some of this is likely attributed to spending excessive time communicating through texting and social media, at the expense of time spent talking to others in person. There are some children who are just shy or otherwise socially awkward who need the full support of their parents and other trusted mentors to become comfortable with conversation. On many occasions, I have expressed concerns to parents about their teenagers being somewhat withdrawn and hesitant to speak out. Sometimes the response is that I should not worry, because they have all kinds of friends. In many cases, it turns out that these so-called friends are random strangers that they connect with on the Internet as they play group video games. I have also seen teenagers who have 4.0 grade point averages or better who end up failing to achieve their goals of acceptance into competitive academic institutions or acceptance into competitive internships and other golden opportunities because they simply could not hold a conversation with an interviewer. So, in many ways beyond the pure academic record in high school, the foundation of resume building will be tied to learning how to develop strong conversational skills, and this will be addressed early on in the book.

In the adult world, we all recognize that work experience is a key component to our resumes, but employment during the high school years can be a slippery slope. My late father-in-law spent most of his life as a professor at Berea College, where the student body consisted of smart students who came from economically challenged families. Almost all of his students had work experience during high school out of economic necessity. What my father-in-law found interesting during his career were the differences in what students...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.10.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-2014-7 / 9798350920147