Beyond the Tassel

In the world of things that matter to your academic outcomes, I cannot overemphasize the importance of understanding institutional programmatic strength. That’s just gotta be job one, if you’re primarily concerned with the strictly academic outcome. But here’s the thing, college is about more than strict academic outcomes. Sure, it matters. It matters a lot. But there are other things that also matter. How those other things compete for attention in your mind is something only you can answer. But I know enough about the college experience and talk to enough students, moms, and dads, to know that for them other things do matter. And some of those things will absolutely give academics a pretty good run for their money. The social scene. The distance from home. The guiding institutional principles — is it faith-based, is it super rigorous, is it known for helping undergrads land great jobs or get into top grad schools? These things may very well compete for priority attention with something like programmatic strength. But it will be up to you to decide how important it is and where it will fall in your overall scheme of priorities. The fact is, if you want to go into journalism, you can do no harm by going to Western Kentucky University, but the fact is, if you went to Northwestern instead, you’d almost certainly have a broader range of grad school or career options waiting for you upon completion. Now, if you don’t want to leave Kentucky for college or can’t quite see yourself in a Chicago winter in a dorm room, 500 miles from your parents, Northwestern, no matter how good its programmatic strength, is not the right call for you. See what I mean?

We’ve come through infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Each and every one of us is made up of uniquely individual characteristics and experiences, which give shape to who we are, and hopefully each of us will plot a path forward that best aligns with our interests, aptitudes, and capabilities. The post-secondary transition is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ program. There are those who will serve our Nation by enlisting in the military. There are those who will join a family business or a family farm right out of high school. There are those who will head-off to a trade school and enter the world of work soon after, while some will move directly into shift-work, freelance work, or start their own business. But the majority of high school seniors will be heading to college after they complete high school. In rural America, the statistics, nationwide, are about 68%, with nearly 45% choosing a 4-year college or university and about 23% choosing to attend a community college, usually one within 30 miles of their home. There isn’t a bad option among these post-secondary intentions. There is only bad fit, which also leaves us with ‘good’ fit. And the idea that we have this continuum, from bad fit to good fit, suggests that with a little thought and some exploratory effort, we can reasonably expect to land in what others have called the Goldilocks zone. The ‘just right’ zone. Those who’ve been with me for awhile on our podcast will recall that, while I am a huge advocate for post-secondary education now, there was a time in my life when it was not very important to me at all. So there is also a timing piece to this puzzle. To all things, their season. At 18, I was deeply engrossed in building my own business — which I did — but by 45, college became very, very important to me, and so I made it happen. 

Today, I’d like to talk about finding our dominant path, what colleges and universities refer to as declaring your major. But finding your dominant path isn’t JUST about college; you can apply many of these ideas to a non-college trajectory as well. The work of author and researcher, Simon Sinek in his ‘Start with Why’ book series, has been called among the most important guidance a person can seek. Because finding fit in all your life paths is so crucial to finding happiness and fulfillment, Sinek helps his readers identify their most authentic drivers and, from there, helps them better understand how their engagements can fulfill their most genuine needs and desires, professionally, personally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually. It’s a fairly deep topic, let’s dive in.

Roommating is hard. And sometimes — more frequently than you might imagine — roommate situations erupt into really tough, super distracting outcomes. I spoke with a few current college students and several recent grads for this episode, and let me tell ya, this is one of those things your guidance counselor probably isn’t talking much about very much. We examine a few ideas, here, about the best way forward as both a roommate and a student with roommates. There are a few things you can do to make the potentially difficult road ahead much smoother, and we discuss them here from the perspective of current and former students with stories to tell.

When most students think of where they’ll go to college, many immediately consider the three schools with which they’re most familiar: their state flagship school, their regional university, and their community college. I’m going to talk about those first two today. We covered Community College pretty thoroughly a few months back, so we’ll leave that option out of today’s discussion. For many students, these schools are outstanding fits for all kinds of excellent reasons. But just like any other collegiate consideration, there are pros AND cons. We’re going to examine them here.

The post-secondary path often takes a circuitous route through a series of dark tunnels, switchbacks, dead-ends, trial balloons, and unknowns but at the end of the day, those who remain true to the journey, approach it with an open mind, and retain a willingness to put their back into it, stand a very good chance of finding excellent fit. And if there’s anything I love, it’s good post-secondary fit! But when we’re wrapping-up the Junior year in high school and heading into Senior year, it can seem a daunting task to find our way onto the right trailhead and even once we’re on it, mysteries about the process often still abound. Especially in this very different Covid era. So, I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at what actually happens behind the college admissions curtain, unwind a few of those ‘mysteries,’ and examine a few strategies for making the most of it all.

Educators tell me all the time that it takes a village to successfully build a robust, energized school community with positive outcomes. And that’s not something that happens automatically. The state can’t do it. The school board can’t do it. The best faculty in the world can’t do it. And it cannot be administered into submission. It takes everyone. Parents, students, teachers, civic leaders, community volunteers, the business community, alumni, and a kind of cohesion of purpose that is difficult to conjure. But every now and then, I come across a community that has landed on a winning formula and Effingham, Illinois is such a community. This rural Illinois city of 14,000 is set amidst hundreds of thousands of acres of soybeans, corn, and wheat fields, bisected by not one but two major interstates, and whose county is home to six high schools. All in a county of just 34,000. The community is chock-full of innovative small business people and seems to pulsate with unusually high entrepreneurial energy, all of which is connected to a central business advocacy presided over by one of the Nation’s longest serving and most highly respected chamber of commerce leader — Norma Lansing. Norma joins us today to talk about how this community has made the most of its business and education connectedness, how they’ve managed through the pandemic and have come out stronger, and how they are preparing their young people for a productive future with home-grown commitment to education and career development.

We live in an extraordinarily interconnected society. But that’s really not new. Truth is, we always have. And those of us who grew up in small towns understand that reality, perhaps, better than most. Seems like having the inside scoop on the goings-on of my hometown, population 3,372, was almost an olympic sport when I was growing up. There was a crowd-sourced web of information gathering woven into the fabric of daily life. And, for the most part, the intel delivered through this web was fairly accurate. But it was also a powerful source of discomfort for those who suffered the indignity of false accusations and undeserved whacks at their reputation. When I was a senior in high school, there were no cell phone videos, no Twitter, and no Instagram or Facebook. So, while the crowd-sourced intelligence-gathering woven into the fabric of my hometown might have known who was gathered at the rock pile on a Friday night, red Solo cups in-hand, there was no formal record of it. The events that took place and the words uttered there may have resulted in damaged friendships or local reputations, those words, events, and activities floated upon memory alone, and were seldom, if ever, formally captured.

Today, we live in a very different world. That’s not really even a question. Social media and its vast reach into our lives, granted of course, by us, has made that so. The question before us — really — is, how will we make the most of it? You already know some of it. But I’m guessing there are a few things you can do to leverage this new reality you haven’t yet considered. Let’s take a few minutes today and explore that.

Today, I want to explore these three important attributes of successful people. What they are, how we can acquire them, and how we can leverage them to accomplish remarkable things in our lives beyond the high school tassel. Not coincidentally, these are also the three things most often sought by college admissions departments, and so we’ll talk about what that looks like, as well. Those things? Passion, intellectual curiosity, and perseverance — The Golden Keys.

First of all, can we all just accept that learning new things, along with the practical insights and strategic advantages they bring, is really one of THE most remarkable things about being human?  I mean, sure, you could argue that all our fellow phyla in the animal kingdom do their share of learning and adapting, too, but best we know, none of them have quite the intellectual leveraging capabilities of humankind. Because of the way we’ve developed, and the resulting extent of the raw computational horsepower nested in our brains, we’re able to make all sorts of connections between disparate ideas, disciplinary variants, leveraged through language, our opposable thumbs, and a remarkable knack for tool-making and systems development and navigation. Phew! That said, learning can be picked up in all kinds of places — and, factually speaking, it is. Human beings are learning machines. Natural problem solvers. I would argue that one of the of the greatest human accomplishments of all time has been the codification of knowledge and its distribution through formal education. Not everyone loves school but, regardless, everyone IS learning. Always. Some more than others, but you get the idea. By the time most of us reach high school, we’ve become pretty good at understanding the patterns of formal learning. And, as it turns out, even the very process of LEARNING is learning. The evolution of education is almost a cliche. Some of it has created anxiety that not everyone loved — think: common core. But lots of other bits have landed squarely in the plus column. And I think dual credit is one of those. 

This week, I’d like to do something a little different than usual. I’d like you to meet two students with rural roots but very different personal stories. Jackeline Garcia is a senior at Effingham High School in Effingham, Illinois, a county with a population of just 34,000. She is the first generation daughter of Mexican immigrants and she has an acceptance letter from The University of Notre Dame. We’ll hear from her and learn more about her Journey. We’ll also speak with a third year student at the University of Chicago and discuss his unusual route for getting there from a rural, coal-mining town in deep southern Illinois through a top, suburban prep-school in Metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri. Both students are on fascinating journeys and both have done much to prepare for them.