Countdown to College ― The Essential Steps to Your Child's Successful Launch

After all the testing and touring and applying, your child has been accepted to college. Congratulations! Now what?

Every new student grapples with making a successful transition to college—with remaining healthy, happy, grounded, and in school. Indeed, the national statistics are sobering: one in three freshmen will not come back for sophomore year, and less than 50 percent will graduate on time. A student’s adjustment is key, especially during the period starting with the lazy summer months before move-in and ending at the dizzying close of a student’s first semester. And parents must prepare for the absence of their child, who has been their focus for a very long time, in order to make this change a win for the whole family. Distilling lessons and sharing stories (some cautionary, some entertaining, all helpful) from her long college advisory career, Ivy League dean Monique Rinere presents a unique month-by-month road map to a college experience that is rich, rewarding, and successful for teens and parents alike. Taking parents from the moment the acceptances arrive to the end of the first college semester, her expert advice covers:

• assessing the right fit among your child’s options: who and what to ask to get the real scoop on campus and academic life
• understanding actual costs: considering hidden expenses, financial-aid and scholarship fine print, loans, and work-study opportunities
• parenting through the senior slump so that students don’t jeopardize their hard-won college spot
• talking to your child about freshman culture shock and their new freedoms around parties, food, finances, and sleep
• what your child needs to know about working with an academic advisor, interacting with professors, and creating their own community of advisors
• how to help your rising freshman create a conceptual bridge from what they are, a graduating high school senior, to what they want to be, a college alum
• time-management and class-scheduling tips to help your child pick an appropriate class (and extracurricular) load
• advice for parents facing the emptying nest: letting go of your anxieties about your child’s autonomy and seizing this opportunity to reinvent your life in new and intentional ways

Monique Rinere was a first-generation college student, earning her B.A. from Hunter College and then her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. She was a residential college dean at Princeton and the dean of advising for Columbia, and she founded the advising programs office at Harvard University. She is now the associate vice president of The New School, leading academic advising, career development, academic integrity, and student health services, among other student-centered initiatives. She lives in New York City.