Fall tends to be my favorite time of the year. Because honestly, what’s not to love? There’s football, great holiday food, and family time. Sure, each of those things brings its share of heartburn (both literally and figuratively). But every year without fail, we gear up for the gauntlet that is the fall season, and by the end of it we’ve settled into the nostalgia and merriment of the holidays.
Lately though, fall has signaled another kind of change. One that seems to be happening faster than I’m ready for. The past few weeks alone have brought the launch of our fall college tour, my oldest daughter getting her license and being accepted into a dual enrollment program at Georgia State, and my high school freshman interviewing for her first job. So many milestones, all happening so quickly.
Two weeks ago, we visited the University of Georgia with my oldest daughter, Riley, who is a junior this year. Though she was the primary visitor, we brought the whole tribe along, because it’s never too early for the rest of them to get a glimpse of college life, right? It wasn’t our first trip to a college campus. The girls have basically grown up visiting Emory’s campus off and on, since my wife and I are both alumni, and we’ve already visited Fort Valley State, an HBCU in middle Georgia. But lately, it’s all starting to feel a little too real.
Take our visit to UGA. I assumed it would be a “check the box” visit, since Riley had never shown much interest in a big state school, even one with a pre-veterinary program. Fortunately, Georgia does a good job of making a large school feel small. It also helped that we know a Georgia alum and staff member (we sit on a board together) who arranged a private tour of the Animal Sciences program. Along with a student ambassador who shared their own experiences in the department, they pulled back the curtain on what life as a student there would really look like. That’s social capital at work, my friends. Riley got to ask real questions: how much hands-on experience she’d get in her first few years, and what opportunities she’d have to explore. By the end of the visit, we were all saying #GoDawgs and imagining crisp fall Saturdays in Athens on game day.
But then, a week later, things changed. Or maybe they didn’t change so much as what I’d suspected all along became clear. We’d had Berry College circled on the calendar for months because it checked so many boxes. It has an intimate student body (fewer than 2,500 students, compared to nearly 50,000 at UGA). Yet paradoxically, it has the largest contiguous campus in the world: 27,000 gorgeous acres at the base of the north Georgia mountains. I’m sure the familiar scene of animals and farmland was a selling point for Riley, given that’s exactly what her first school looked like.
One of the guides told us there are about 12 acres for every student. Best of all, Berry’s apprenticeship model of learning is basically a continuation of the way she’s been doing school for the last several years. Unlike UGA, where she’d be competing with thousands of kids for a finite number of opportunities, here experiential learning is built into every student’s undergraduate experience. By the time we’d finished the tour, talked with students, and met professors in her department, I could tell she was in her sweet spot. And when we finally sat down in the student cafeteria for a late lunch, the french toast sticks sealed it. Even her younger sister (our high school freshman) said she could see herself visiting on weekends, even if only for the food!
Before we arrived, I’d joked with my wife that I expected Riley to have an aha moment like the one I’ve described to the girls more times than they’d probably like. I was standing in the Dobbs University Center (the DUC) on Emory’s campus with my mom when it hit me. I turned to her and said, “This is it. This is where I’m going to school.” I’d fallen in love. Never mind that I’d technically already committed to the College of Charleston (my first love, and still my favorite city). I’d even sent in a tuition deposit to hold my room, and my best friend from high school and I were going to be roommates. I thought I had it all figured out, until I didn’t.
Life interrupted those plans, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Without that shift, I probably wouldn’t have met Samantha (we lived in the same freshman dorm at Emory), and we wouldn’t have created this wonderful family of ours.
On the drive home from Berry, I shared this story with Riley as a reminder. You don’t always know where life is going to take you. It’s still too early to say whether Berry is where she’ll end up. But she’s ahead of the game in knowing what she wants, and that will make her next move much easier to recognize when she sees it.
As for me, I’m trying to remember the same lesson. We’re entering a new frontier of drivers and future college students and all the things. There’s an image of the future in my mind, but it’s incomplete. As parents, we don’t always know where life is going to take us. Neither do they. The best any of us can do is take it one milestone at a time as the picture becomes clearer.
SDW3
