Maneuvering Bureaucracies

I was talking to my good friend in Georgia over the weekend, when she relayed a humorous college deadline story. Her high school senior daughter decided to make early application to Florida State University. She diligently filled out the application, asked for the needed letters of recommendation, wrote her application essay, and was sure she had done all that was requested. Yet, when she clicked the send button, the application refused to send. She tried again and the same thing—FSU would not accept her application. Upon further investigation, she discovered she had forgotten to ask her high school to send her official transcripts.

What my friend’s daughter found out is that FSU will not accept the application until everything that is required is in the queue and ready to go. Unfortunately, the deadline was upon her and it was fall break. No one was at her high school to send the necessary transcripts. After my friend and her daughter scrambled to get in touch with the right person from the high school, the transcripts were secured, and Dad, the FSU hopeful, and younger brother jumped in the car and drove five hours to Tallahassee to hand deliver the application. She beat the deadline by two hours. The drive down and back were good “father-children bonding time,” my friend mused.

While it is easy to laugh over the frantic hustle in stories like these—there is a similar one in Chapter 6 of my book, Toward College Success: Is Your Teenager Ready, Willing, and Able?—such stories bring up another skill students need to master in order to be successful in college: maneuvering a bureaucracy. As I point out in Toward College Success, students will need to follow university deadlines and expectations in order to move forward. Many a student has found himself going to summer school or an extra semester to fulfill a requirement that he somehow wasn’t aware of, or found himself in the wrong semester for a sequence class, or discovered too late that he is missing paperwork or signatures needed for graduating.

Once at college, countless students slowly come to realize that the repeated directive, “pay attention and follow directions,” they heard all through middle and high school actually is as important as the information they were required to learn. It is critical that students and parents understand that once in that institution known as college, the student will be responsible for administrative deadlines, requirements for completing an academic major and/or degree program, and financial arrangements and deadlines.

To help prepare your teenager to pay attention to guidelines and follow through, gradually give them charge of their own calendars. Guide them through making time for schoolwork deadlines as well as extracurricular activities. Make your teenager responsible for meeting the deadlines for ordering a yearbook, signing up for a school trip, or applying for a summer job. After warning her that the deadline is approaching, let the consequences teach her what happens is she misses the cutoff. Then, by the time she is a senior, she will be better prepared to meet all the deadlines for high school graduation and for applying to college.