Fish Market Prep 🐠
Give A Teen A Fish
Remember the proverb, “Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day. Teach someone to fish and they’ll eat for a lifetime?” Well, let’s just say that our current college prep model is essentially a tour of a fish market.
The traditional college prep model focuses on matching criteria sets about college. Matching is great. But it’s not where we should be starting teens on their college prep journey. I visited the CollegeBoard’s college matching quiz because it’s one of the first resources most school counselors share with students and parents. The quiz asks visitors to provide the following information:
GPA range
Desired Majors
Desired University Type: Public, Private - Religious, Private - Not Religiously affiliated
Desired University Setting: Big City, Small City, Suburban, or Rural environment
Desired University Proximity: within a city or away from a zip code
I completed my own search for an A+ student in New York who was undecided on majors, type, setting, and proximity. CollegeBoard generated a list of 955 random colleges - mostly in California? (This makes me question why certain universities are featured above others - the list was not in alphabetical or geographic order so I wonder why and how they presented the schools.) Even for me, with nearly twenty years of college prep expertise, the search results were random and overwhelming. And, when humans are overwhelmed by choices and decisions, our brains begin to shut down in a process called choice paralysis.
To navigate choice paralysis, some families turn to independent college consultants, to help provide a more individualized list of colleges. While helpful and great for making sure teens meet their application deadlines, this consultant is essentially a fancy personalized shopper for the same fish market. Usually, this consultant is a former admissions officer, a former school counselor, or a former academic tutor who realized they can provide the structure for teens applying to college. They usually do not have the training in adolescent brain development and career counseling to realize they are solving the wrong problem!
Most teens want to think about their future! They want to learn how to fish. So, imagine their frustrations when the answers are a fancy fish market with so many kinds of fish. The pressure becomes picking the “right” fish. Instead…we can do college prep differently and disrupt the current model by
Teach a Teen to Fish
If we want to teach teens how to fish, we need to start with the art and science of introspection. I once spoke with a college consultant who was bemoaning how painful it is to get teens to write their personal statements. The consultant said to me “I wish there was a way to teach kids how to think more critically.” The consultant said this like critical thinking is a fixed skill: kids have it or they don’t. I chuckled to them and said “you know, teaching critical thinking is something that therapists do - we guide our clients in meaningful reflection, we foster self-reflection, and we grow self-awareness!”
Introspection can be taught! And, if we start teaching introspection early in a teen’s journey, they arrive at junior year with clarity and direction: knowing 1) what their strengths and interests are and 2) how to translate these strengths and interests onto a college campus.
When we focus on skill-building rather than college list building, we replace the overwhelm with concrete doable tasks. Introspection builds the foundation of the college prep skill set and is the first lesson in how we teach teens to fish!
First, teens need to first explore their interests in genuine ways. It’s much harder to meaningfully reflect on why a student is president of the debate club if they joined the debate club because “it looks good to colleges.” We - the adults - need to help younger teens foster their interests both in and outside of school in a genuine way. This is why starting early is so important — we can grow their interest and engagement over time and without pressure.
Second, teens need to learn how to recognize and articulate their strengths. With limited life experiences, teenagers are rarely able to articulate their strongest qualities. Yet, hearing someone else describe your strengths is not nearly as powerful as discovering your own strengths. It took me hearing the same feedback about my strengths at 3 different jobs before I accepted they were right! Introspection is about fostering a sense of awareness over your skills. And, again, this is why starting early is so important - we can grow this awareness through a process of observations, informational interviews, and family storytelling.
Next, teens needs to understand how colleges work and what various majors mean. There are SO many new words that describe colleges and I find most teens - even my 4.0 AP Scholars skip over the words rather than look it up (see “interdisciplinary”) From general education requirements to open curriculum, to methods of instruction - teens usually have no clue what’s possible for them to experience on a college campus. This is a gap we can fill. And, again, this is why starting early is so important - we can introduce what is exciting and important about colleges well before students need to have defined college criteria.
Introspection reduces choice paralysis and fosters the critical thinking skills that lead to clarity and conviction throughout the college prep process.
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