"The Fever"

“Just promise me you won’t catch the fever!”

My husband said this to me last year when I was bubbling over with information after the first pre-college meeting at my daughter’s high school. I knew exactly what he meant by “the fever.” In our house, this mysterious ailment involves the frenzied, panicked, overzealous, uber-competitive behavior of high school students (and their parents) vying for those precious, hard-to-get, super-selective, one-in-a-million spots in today’s colleges and universities. (It’s important to note that last year our daughter was only in 10th grade. She still had almost 3 more years of high school left before leaving our nest.)

As our daughter’s junior year of high school quickly approaches, I’m trying really hard not to catch any fever, but it’s tough! If one wants to be a competitive high school student today, our kid will need to successfully get through the toughest classes in her school, spend a million hours doing homework and projects, explore extra-special extracurricular activities, and try to do something amazing to change the world.

Even if our daughter does all of this, there are thousands of kids out there doing the same thing or more, like this incoming freshman I read about on a top tier college’s website: _____ loves to write. She played varsity volleyball and performed with several musical groups in and out of school, but writing is her first and foremost passion. In November of her junior and senior years, she threw herself into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and the summer before her senior year she took part in the Iowa Young Writers Studio. She also was one of 12 students in Massachusetts to receive the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Achievement Award in 2009. An avid hiker, she belongs to the Four Thousand Footer Club and has climbed all 48 of the mountains higher than 4,000 feet in New Hampshire.

All I can say is Wow!! Really??

So I’ll work on not believing everything I hear and spiral into the competitive abyss of pre-college requirements. I’ll plan on keeping a level head and an open mind and encourage and support my daughter in every way I can--even if that means buying all of the requisite reference books (like The Fiske Guide 2011), reading all the College Confidentail blogs, attending all the standing-room-only college fairs, and touring all the far away university campuses.