Alex Hutchins
Opinions Editor
If you’re like me, college visiting during your junior and senior year is a time of unparalleled stress and anxiety. You create unrealistic standards for your “dream school,” which it inevitably fails to meet, leaving you with the seemingly rhetorical question: where do I want to go to college? If picking your top choice school doesn’t quite stress you out, maybe the feeling that the colleges you visit reflect upon your abilities does. But, the most stressful thing of all is worrying about how you and your parents are perceived by the demigod that is the admissions officer. The anxiety of coming face-to-face during the information session with the person who, come fall, will have the ability to fulfill or destroy your dreams, will push you to extremes to perfect your and your parents’ image. You may be tempted, or even feel forced, to ask certain questions or wear certain clothes in an attempt to fool an admissions officer into thinking that you are some boy or girl genius who has perfect grades and an appearance that says the phrase “awkward stage” never applied to you. However, the truth is we, along with our parents, really look like something more along these lines:
The Helicopter Mom:
This person may be found essentially “hovering” over her child towards the back of the campus tour tentatively nodding her head as the tour guide spews out line after line of hard-to-believe stories of why the dorms on the left are shaped like a barn because of the last name of an alum who lost out on naming rights for the building to a higher-paying alum because he only donated a meager $3 billion instead of $7 billion. However, as soon as the tour guide even so much as mentions the word “co-ed” followed by “bathroom” or “floor” this sweatshirt-tied-around-the-waist, mom-jeans-wearing woman will attack the guide with a tornado of questions ranging from, “Are the showers separated? And if not, do they face each other?” to “Is my daughter going to have to see a boy in a towel? Will a boy see her in a towel?” to “So, can you tell us the measurements of the floor to stall door height?” This queen of questions can also be found interrogating tour guides about the improbability of a blue light phone being able to protect their kid with questions like, “How will a little blue telephone save my son from getting shot by one of those gangsters?” or even, “What if the cops don’t come in time to save my baby?”
The Sports-Obsessed Alum:
Usually clad in the school’s colors, featuring a too-tight-fitting t-shirt with the name of the school’s sports team that he participated in “back in his day,” this guy can be found standing in what he deems an imposing stature: arms crossed at the front of the group and most certainly in people’s personal space. On top of his appearance, you can easily spot him checking out the sports fields or asking something along the lines of, “So how’s the lacrosse team doing? Are they still as good as when I was here?” or “That’s where ‘the boys’ and I used to hang after practice.” In addition to his frequent flashbacks to the glory days, this dad is sure to brag about his “prodigy” son. During the tour, this former jock can be found chatting up other parents about what brought him and his supposedly Olympic-material son to campus. The second you walk into a ten minute long, unwarranted, one-sided rant on how he was the archetype of physical fitness in his twenties and how his bottomless pit of sports know-how is the reason his son is currently in “big talks” with a number of “very important” recruitment officers at his alma mater, you’ll know you’ve met the Sports-Obsessed Alum.
The Bobblehead Student:
Often found clinging to the tour guide or admissions officer, this prospective student will do anything they can to ensure that they get as much face time with anyone affiliated with the college, even a petty freshman who has absolutely no influence on the admissions process. The Bobblehead gets his name from his almost perturbing habit of vigorously nodding his head in unison with a forced smile in response to everything he hears during his prolonged conversations. The only time the Bobblehead stops nodding his head is when he is chatting his victim’s ear off about the “epiphanies” he had during his “life-changing” summer volunteering in a country, which he apparently has forgotten the name of, using his extensive experience in manual labor to construct a building that will stand as the paradigm of charity for years to come. If you listen closely, it should be even easier for you to find the Bobblehead because he has an uncanny ability to string together a record number of incorrectly used SAT vocabulary words in one sentence. When on college tours, be sure to watch out for the rare opportunity that the Bobblehead is found more than five feet away from an admissions officer or tour guide, because you will witness one of nature’s greatest phenomenons: the panic attack. Watching the Bobblehead fight his way to the front of the tour of 100+ people, pushing, shoving and trampling, all while trying to maintain his forced smile, will certainly make your “college experience” more interesting.
We have all seen the Helicopter Mom, the Sports-Obsessed Alum and the Bobblehead Student on our college tours; but, at the end of the day, can we truly say that we, or our parents, have never been one of these three people? College touring puts stress on everybody, and almost everyone will act a bit bizarre when they are outside of their comfort zones. While it may seem impossible to be yourself in such high-stress, uncomfortable situations, the payoff of pushing through the anxiety and realizing that you don’t have to be some sort of superhuman is well worth it. Learning to relax will help you feel more comfortable when you are meeting someone who may actually have a say in your acceptance, such as during a college interview. If you can avoid the stress and act like yourself when it counts, the college will be able to see you as a person and not simply a folder of classes and test scores, which if you think about it, is one of the best ways to ensure that you get matched up with an institution that will do the best job of helping you develop into the person you are meant to be.
