When you welcome your first child into your family, you aren’t thinking about transcripts for high school and college. You are savoring the moment and realizing that the Lord has blessed you with the miracle of life. As the years go by, you are busy. Busier than you have ever been! You have diapers to change, meals to cook, carpool runs, helping with math, reading through a paper, and attending concerts, recitals, performances, and games. It is never-ending.
Then one day you wake up and realize your child is now a high school student. How in the world did this happen? You aren’t ready! You don’t want to face it!
Yes, it happens to all of us. And for some who are more planner-types, we start thinking about it when our student is in middle school. We consider what will the future hold.
How do I figure out transcripts?
I wanted to start my blog and newsletter with ideas for organizing your thoughts about your student’s future. This is what I did for my first daughter and I’m doing the same for the second.
The college admissions process involves several categories: transcripts, testing, credit before college, college research, and scholarships.
First of all, what I did to organize my thoughts and ideas was to purchase a large binder filled with colorful pockets. In these pockets, I would file info I received, copies of blog posts, and ideas that occurred to me into the folders.
Eventually, I decided that I am a note-taker and I needed more room for my notes than just pockets.
So I finally switched to a 5-subject college-ruled notebook with pockets. I used the pockets to file things and the paper to take the copious notes I like to write out about a subject. For instance, for transcripts, I wrote down what I found and heard at various seminars, questions I had about possible courses we could look into, and information about what weighted and unweighted means, as well as how to count a course that you do at home.
Five Areas To Research For College Planning:
I divided my notebook into 5 subject areas.
1. Transcripts and Planning High school coursework
2. Standardized Testing: PSAT, ACT, SAT
3. Credit before College: AP, IB, CLEP, Dual Enrollment
4. College Research
5. Scholarships
One of my favorite books that helped me with figuring out the whole transcript process is linked here on this page.
The college admission process is going to be different for each family and for each student within the family. It’s not a cookie-cutter process. However, if you can gather what you think is interesting for your family into an organized notebook, you will have the information you need at your fingertips when you need it. If you are careful, you’ll have no problems getting your child launched and sent off to the college of their choice.
How do you keep your notes organized? Are you a planner or are you planning to just “wing it when you get there?”
Michelle
