We are really in the home stretch now. My daughter's second quarter report card was released yesterday (she managed to keep her grades up despite a growing desire to be done with high school forever — or longer if that's possible). She has one more quarter of regular courses left, then ... Senior Project.
(With an AP Bio test squeezed in there somewhere.)
You may have noticed that I initial cap'd the words Senior and Project. That's because it is very much a proper noun. Senior Project. Senior Project. SENIOR PROJECT! It's something to aspire to, to revere, to regard with awe. Senior Project is a legend that you hear about when you start as a freshman. It offers fantastically adult promises — like open campus, no classes, and an internship.
The internship must be unpaid, but other than that, the field is fairly open. Some kids volunteer in hospitals or as teachers' aids. Some work in offices or libraries. You could build with habitat for humanity or work in a soup kitchen or community garden. My daughter will no doubt find (yet another) opportunity to work with horses.
For a while there, my daughter and her classmates thought the very existence of Senior Project might be in jeopardy. When she was a sophomore, a new principal came in and made seemingly countless, wide-reaching changes, eliminating many of the squishier bits of how the school had been run and adding rules, regulations, processes and procedures. Senior Project was in his cross-hairs for a while, and the underclassmen held their collective breath. Whether someone made a solid case for it (thank you, someone) or the principal ran out of steam or, perhaps more likely, he realized that the lunchroom is overcrowded and getting most of the seniors out of the building would be blessed cafeteria congestion relief ... who knows? The point is, here we are, Spring 2016.
And Senior Project is on!
The fact that one is a senior does not automatically guarantee that one may pursue a Senior Project. Mais non, mon ami. One must have a certain GPA, a limited number of absences, a spotless detention record. (Having earned detention is acceptable provided that said detention was actually fulfilled.)
And, even with the above criteria met, Senior Project is not a free-for-all six weeks of hooky. There are conditions and criteria. Each student must spend 40 hours a week (35, if they're still taking an AP class) at an approved internship under the supervision of an approved supervisor. He or she must secure a faculty mentor and check in with them on a regular basis. Participants have to keep a journal and then make a 5 or 10-minute presentation when the entire experience is over.
(After hearing all this at a Senior Project parents' meeting, I asked my daughter if it might not be easier to just stay and finish her courses. She looked at me like I had two heads and came from the planet Zot. It's a look she's quite good at; she's had years of practice.)
The paperwork is due this week. Another thing my daughter is very very good at is procrastination. (Of course, she has competition there. Every mom I know boasts the same of her daughter or son.) So, I have no doubt that all of her forms will be turned in on time. Just barely.
Stay tuned. Coming up next: Senior Project, Part 2 "Getting The Internship."
If you've enjoyed this post, I invite you to order the book Lovin' the Alien here.
Besides horse shows and houseguests and a single, quick family vacation, this coming summer will be all about college admissions.
Believe me, no one is looking forward to it less than my daughter. (Except maybe me.)
We need to visit more schools, work on essays and create my daughter's first résumé.
Say what?
I put together my first résumé about six months after I graduated from college. I had won a fellowship which included a paid internship at a New York publishing company, so I did my real job hunting a little later than my classmates. Anyway, I was twenty-two and had actually worked for half a year. My daughter is seventeen. What is she supposed to put on her résumé? (Actually, when I was seventeen, I did have a résumé, but it was just because I was pursuing acting work.)
According to the website InLikeMe.com, my daughter's résumé should include:
• A heading: that's the easy part: name and address
• Her objective: college acceptance and merit scholarships
• Key stats: class ranking, GPA, SAT and/or ACT scores
• Education: high school, AP and Honors courses
• School activities: basically ... well ... none, but I assume we can address the past 12 years of horse lessons, training and competitions
• Honors and awards: by year
• Enrichment activities: travel, hobbies
• Work experience: include special duties or recognition
• Other: they encourage us to find a "hook" or "wow factor"
• References
None of the above is particularly daunting. But, there is one other item, nestled in between "Honors and awards" and "Enrichment activities."
Community service.
So now we're looking for a volunteer opportunity, a formal "service" project that she can list on her college and National Honor Society applications.
She needs to find something to which she can donate "at least twenty hours"
of her time. And she'll need a letter of recommendation and signature
from someone in charge.
I
find this extremely irritating and superficial. Most of the teens I've
talked to are contributing time to a cause for the very two reasons I've
outlined above. For those reasons — and pretty much only those reasons.
Service is important, don't get me wrong. But, there are lots of ways to give back.
When
we first gave my daughter an allowance, we were pretty generous: $10 a
week. (I think I earned about 35¢, but milk was probably a nickel and we
probably walked to school barefoot, in snow, uphill, both ways.) With
that $10, however, came stipulations. She had to save some of it and
donate some of it. She made donations to everything from animal rescues
to cancer rides. Often, if there was something that really moved her, we
would match her donation.
As
a family, we traveled to New Orleans a few months after Hurricane
Katrina. We worked in a relief station in a town called Aribe, which was
utterly destroyed. Not only did my daughter — then quite little — serve, but she got to know
some of the storm's victims. And she worked her tail off.
Every
year since before she can remember, my daughter has helped us make
school backpacks and Christmas stockings for needy children in our area.
In fact, she took the exercise so to heart that she contacted the
president of the organization and suggested that he add each child's
"favorite color" to the age and gender information we already received.
As a kid herself, she thought it would be terrible (tragic even) if a
girl who liked blue got a backpack in pink.
She sponsors a child in Indonesia and writes to her often, including paper dolls and stickers that can be sent flat through the mail. (We were warned early on that if we sent actual 3-D packages, our sponsored child's family would have to pay exorbitant import duties.) Thanks to the sponsorship (which, believe me, is less than my daughter's Frappuccino habit), the girl gets to go to school and is hoping to become a teacher.
She also adopted a young officer in Afghanistan through an organization called Soldier's Angels. For two years, my daughter sent him a letter every week and a package once a month (for some reason, beef jerky was always one of the requested items). When he finally returned home, he sent her a dog tag with her name on it as a "Thank you."
Through the same organization, we adopted a soldier's family one Christmas. Together, we looked up grocery stores near their address and bought a gift card so they could enjoy a holiday feast. We stuffed stockings and picked out gifts for the two children (a little girl and a toddler), and included lots of decorations, treats and trinkets in the box we sent as well.
My daughter is also generous with her time when any classmates need help. (Between you and me, she should be paid for all the un-official Physics tutoring she's done this year.)
And, I haven't even listed (quite honestly, because I can't) how many walk-a-thons, cancer rides, horse rescues and school fundraisers we've contributed to. Most recently, my daughter donated to a group that lets inner city kids experience horseback riding. When she was younger, she helped the same group create its "Read to Ride" program.
Bottom line. My daughter has served since she was very small and continues to do so when and how she can. Either with her money or her time. The thing is, when it comes to time, she is more than fully committed these days — between schoolwork; SAT, ACT and AP tests; two part-time jobs; and training at the stable 5-6 days a week, it's very hard to find free time for a regular volunteer gig. But, if I added up all the hours she has spent putting together stockings, backpacks, reading lists, letters to Indonesia and packages to Afghanistan, the number of hours would be significantly more than twenty. The only problem is that none of the above exactly fit the very prescribed idea of "service" when it comes to college applications. There's no one to write the official recommendation letter.
So now, we're shopping around for a service gig for the summer. Something with horses, of course. Or children. Or horses and children.
Expecting teens to serve isn't what's bothering me. We should all serve when and how and as we can. It's the limited definition that's my issue. Mahatma Gandhi said that "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." So I'll look on the bright side. My daughter will find herself this summer, assuming she finds the opportunity and — here's the real challenge — finds the time.
Any chance her teachers would forego summer reading assignments so she can serve?
I didn't think so.
If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of my book Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com.
My advice to newlyweds. Wait a few years longer than your best friends to have children. Let those intrepid souls learn the ropes — and make the mistakes — for you. Then, you'll have a better idea of what's in store.
A few years ago, all of the parents I knew were freaking out, falling over themselves, turning one-handed backflips to make sure that their high school students had outstanding "community service" on their résumés.
Okay, stop the press!
Résumés? Back in the 70s, the only high school students I knew with résumés were the ones pursuing a career in show business. (And, growing up in New York City, I crossed teenage paths with several of them: Diane Lane, Ben Stiller, Cynthia Nixon, Phoebe Cates.) The average everyday teen would have had a fairly lean curriculum vitae. My own would have included babysitting, babysitting and babysitting.
What can I tell you? My career path was limited, but consistent. Back to what I was saying.
All of a sudden, stellar grades, varsity sports and student government weren't enough. The most selective schools expected applicants (in all their spare time, right — see previous sentence) to have volunteered. And, I mean, volunteered big!
Spending an afternoon at a soup kitchen? Not enough! Your aspiring Ivy Leaguer had to organize a four-week, six-county food drive, single-handedly solicit Fortune 500 corporate sponsorship, design a public service ad campaign, write a guest column in The Boston Globe, and get invited to appear on Oprah (or Ellen, at the very least).
Or, they had to start a movement focusing on some serious social problem and leveraging a group of like-minded peers. Then they could use social media to attract members across the country, accumulating posts and pictures and shares and "likes." (Stats they would be sure to regurgitate on college applications.) Extra credit for alliterative or rhyming names such as, "Ballerinas Against Bullying," "Home Schoolers for Housing," or the "Jock Sock Drive."
And, say "bye bye" to family vacations. Your future grad of Harvard, Yale or Princeton had to spend her summer building houses for indigenous peoples in Peru. In 110-degree weather. Carrying water buckets from the next town. Five miles, uphill, both ways.
Having been sufficiently warned by my trailblazing friends, I thought we were in fairly good shape. Since sixth grade, my daughter has worked with a local organization that introduces inner city kids to horseback riding. She created a book list of appropriately horsey titles so that participating students could read and earn points toward riding. For her senior project, in a couple of years, she's planning to work at a local therapeutic riding facility, helping special needs participants gain confidence and coordination. These are carefully chosen activities that demonstrate passion and commitment, a willingness to work hard, and focused experience that can be carried over into her proposed course of study.
I know, blah blah blah.
But wait! Now, all of sudden, the colleges are looking for work. Like work work. Actual, paid, minimum-wage, burger-flipping after school jobs. Uh-oh.
But wait again! Lo and behold, my daughter came home one day and announced that she had found a job. She and one of her BFFs are splitting a part-time retail position. She's working every other weekend at a designer consignment shop about a five-minute walk from our house.
Wow. It's a little weird that I didn't have to do anything to make this happen. It's a little weird that she's going to be helping customers and stocking shelves and ringing up the register and opening the store and closing it up at the end of the day. It's a little weird, but I'm proud of her.
And, just think how good it will look on her résumé.
