Offering Advice
Offering advice to your children about their application is a fine and natural thing you will want to do. Parents can be an invaluable source of experience and good sense. If you happen to be a university admissions tutor or the head of recruitment for a large corporation, then you will be particularly well placed to offer good advice about some (but probably not all) aspects of the process. However, if you are not as close to the heart of it as that, you do need to think carefully before you offer advice. Here are some of the common pitfalls:
- Basing your advice on your own experience of university 25 years ago. Universities and university life have changed since that time and you will almost certainly be out of date.
- Suggesting certain courses will always lead to a good job. Are you sure?
- Suggesting certain universities are good for a particular subject. Again, are you Sure?
- Projecting your own desires onto your offspring. However much you love being a doctor or an advertising executive, it doesn’t mean that they want to be one, too. Students switching courses routinely comment that they never really wanted to do their initial subject but felt that their family expected it.
So advice can be a tough one. You can offer all the usual sound, sensible stuff that kids never want (but always need) to hear. Read the prospectuses, take decisions slowly and carefully, dissuade them from applying for Aramaic & Offshore Engineering just because a best friend has done so, that sort of thing. One really helpful thing you can do is test the reasons for decisions. Check out that universities have been chosen for sensible reasons, such as the quality of a course, and not as a result of some dubious gossip. Be careful with specific advice: if you can’t be sure you are accurate it may do more harm than good.
