Research Paper- A bridge to Prep school and College

Studying away from home

By: Frédérick Hallé

Some students on a sunny day walking to go to class and to the library.

When we talk about studying away from home, people think College/University. It’s a right thinking but there’s more, much more. Students start to go away as young as 14 and I am insisting that it is the students’ decision and not the parents. Depending on the age, there are some different questions but thousands and thousands that people ask themselves before taking the decision, are the same. It is not a small decision, because most of the time, it involves money, big money. I agree that there are scholarships and financial aids but there is so many people out there that only a third of them get something. I’ll go trough all the questions, give you examples, and advice. The purpose of this writing is to help people or inform them about something decently important. I’ll focus on studying away from home at college because it’s a long and hard process but Preparatory school is also going to be part of my writing.

Studying, myself away from home, I left my French Canadian hometown only knowing how to say yes and no. I studied In Alberta, Canada for a year, and I am now in grade 12 at National Sports Academy in New York. Seeing and talking to my teammates and classmates, I can tell you that emotionally, still depending on your age, the first couple months, to a year can be really hard. When it’s your first time away, you miss your family or friends but as the time goes by, you get closer to the people in your school and it becomes your new family. Everyone without exception get homesick at least once during his or her first year. I said first year because after that you find ways to stay busy and you don’t have time to think about home. And people being away from home for a long time usually lose most of their friends. Everyone in this school that I’ve talked to, told me that they have around 4 close friends left. It is just inevitable because when you come back home you’re not on the same path as your friends. Being away from home completely change you, even though you don’t feel like you are, you end up gaining in maturity. With that, comes a new view of the world and new friends. Every time you change school or I would rather say boarding school, you only keep two and if, three good friends. It’s just the way life is made. Just to make it clear, when I talked about boarding, it could be also living in an apartment in college, or in a host family.

I know it might be hard to image or think of what I just said, for someone that have never lived away, and I remember saying that I would never be homesick or lose my friend but its just the way it goes. Destiny is made like this. Oh! And let me be clear about losing friends. You don’t become enemies; you just involuntary start not to take as much news from them as you use to, and verse-versa. I remember when I was in Alberta, the first 3 months I would called my best friend every week and when I started to have more friend at my new school I had less time to call and I didn’t care as much. It might sounds hypocrite but at one point you stop thinking about home. The truth is that usually when you’ve been away from home for a couple months you look forward to go back but once you get there, you are happy for two or three days and after you want to go back to your boarding school/dorm. This is obviously for people that enjoy there time of being a boarding student. If you don’t enjoy it, it’s either not the right school for you, or being away from home is not for you. Once you start to live away from home, you like it. And be careful, I’m talking about students from the age of 14 to 23. This time range is where you make most of your friends that you will have until you get really old. By being away as many as 8 months a year, you will become even more proud of where you’re from, and you will never forget where you grew up.

Money and time are such precious 

things that you can't just throw it 

out the window.

Unconsciously the question that people ask themselves before going away is if they will, emotionally, be able to go threw that huge step in life. The second biggest question is usually from the parents. Money! Some parents would ask themselves, even if they can, if they really want to spend 30 grants. Other parents would need to make sacrifices and get financial aid or the child could get a scholarship, which helps him to have an experience that would last in the kid souvenir forever. Usually it’s a family decision. For financially well-off families, the decision is much easier because there are not as many sacrifices involved. 

If you want to spend your money wisely, make sure you shop colleges. You want to apply to a college that you can reach, SAT’s wise, GPA wise, grades wise and the type of student that goes to that college. You want to make sure that, if you play a sport, that the coaching wants to have you on their team and that you will play at your sophomore year. I said sophomore because as you might know, unless you are really good, you don’t play at your freshman year. It’s a non-written rule. You have to wait for your turn. Eventually will come yours.

There is always a school for everyone you just need to find it.

99% of the time, the only thing that matters to get in college is academics. When we hear that if you’re a really good athlete you can get into a school, it’s a lie, it only happens 1% of the time. Even if you think that you’re an amazing hockey player or basketball player you shouldn't rely on that.

Unless you have an athletic scholarship, you will never get in the school that you don’t have the school curriculum for.

The story differs from college to preparatory school. To get in a prep school, its 55% academic, 30% is your personality and the other 15% is you as an athlete or artist.

Now that we’re talking on how to get in college or prep school, there are requirements more than just your grades that you need to think about a couple months before you apply. At prep school, they ask for your psat/ssat and for the toefl if English isn’t your first language. In eastern colleges they ask for your SAT and the western colleges asks for the ACT and also the toefl if you need one. If you want to know the SAT/ACT average of a school, you can order the U.S news and world report, best colleges rankings magazine of the year on the U.S news and world report website or you can find it on the website itself. I would definitely suggest you to go read more on that site. You can also read about health, science, money, travel and many other important subject of today’s world.

Recently, still on the same website, Kim Clark, the 15th president of Brigham Young University-Idaho and the dean of the Harvard business school from 1995 to 2005, wrote an article on 8 big changes to college admissions in 2010 and 2011.  Basically, colleges raise expectation for tougher classes, better essays.

1. Less time per application- 15 minutes is allow to the first read of an application.

2. Earlier deadlines- It gives more time to the staff to go trough the applications.

3. Less reliance on recommendation- "Ninety-eight percent of recommendations tell us what        students already told us," says Philip Ballinger, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Washington.

4. Less emphasis on high school class rank- More high school are refusing to rank their students.

5. More emphasis on tougher high school courses- "We would much rather see a student challenge himself and get a B" than take an easy class to inflate a GPA, says Kent Rinehart, dean of admission at Marist College.

6. More emphasis on application essays- The percentage of colleges that give essays lots of weight rose from 14 percent in 1993 to 26 percent in 2009, NACAC's survey found. Essays are especially crucial to elite colleges, where they "can make or break your application," says Pitzer's Perez.

7. More attention to the applicant's senior year- In the past, many admissions officers focused on an applicant's sophomore and junior years, and didn't put much weight on senior year courses or grades, says the University of Washington's Ballinger. That's changing. "We think senior year is the most important, and we don't want to see any slacking off. We want to see acceleration of educational difficulty."

8. More application auditing- Stanford, Harvard and a few other colleges have increased their factchecking of applications in the wake of the Adam Wheeler scandal. One tool that a growing number of colleges are using, says NACAC president Miller, is Turnitin, a plagiarism software program that looks for phrases in essays that match those in millions of websites, articles and books.

The eight points above were taken from Kim Clark article posted on November 15^th.

She wrote another interesting article: College living prices rise faster than inflation.

Personally, I think that those changes will help low students in a high ranked school and that it will decrease the chances of high students in a low ranked school.