Molly Texts from Orientation "Hell"

My husband dropped Molly off at 8:00 for her two-day Orientation at Cal Poly Pomona.  I didn't think too much about it; my semester has already begun and I'm running from classroom to meeting to lab and back again.  I got a text from her at 8:03 that said she had arrived and had a friend already, named David.  Three hours later I got a text saying simply "It's so hot!!!!"  I controlled my impulse to reply "It wouldn't be hot if you'd gone to San Francisco State!"  Sometimes being a good mom is in the little things.

I didn't hear anything else until after 9:30 at night. "R u awake?"  Molly knows I am usually in bed by 9:30.  I called her and she answered, which was miraculous in itself.  Molly seldom answers since the cell phone is basically a texting device for her (her brother is the same, although he seldom does either).

She asked if I could log in to her student account right at 8:30 (a.m.) and sign up for her classes, since they were releasing advising holds at that time.  She wouldn't be able to sign on then because advising meetings were scheduled at that time.  She'd already put her preferred classes in the online "shopping cart"; all I had to do was hit "yes" a couple of times and she would be good to go.  Then she had to tell me her password and she said "Don't laugh at me, okay?"  She told me the password was "Cole4EVER" - Cole is her boyfriend.  I laughed.

As she said goodnight, Molly told me everyone else was at a karaoke party, but she'd left to set up her classes.  As I drifted off to sleep, I realized that this was the first time in months that I had been impressed with her initiative.

The next morning I tried to sign her up for classes, but they didn't release her advising hold until almost noon.  I had been concerned that she wouldn't choose good courses - when I advise students, they typically are not thinking tactically about how to meet their requirements, both within their major and for general education.  But I liked the courses she had chosen, and she had even identified back-ups that weren't her top choice but had more seats available.

Here is our text stream on her second day of Orientation:

7:35 am
Molly:  Duuuuude, this sucks.
Liz:  ??
Molly:  Too early.  Also, there are no awesome people here.  My friends are all boring or hard-core drinking party-ers.
Liz:  LOL

8:40 am
Molly:  Everybody here SUUUUUUUCKS.
Liz:  Chill silly girl.  U r just tired.  This will make a great blog post.  Xoxo
Molly:  Haha, true that.  Bur srsly, I would not want to hang out with ANY of these people on a regular basis.
(Discussion of unsuccessful attempts to register for classes.)
Molly:  :-) I'm so glad I'm texting you, it's the only thing keeping me from dying of boredom.
Liz:  Hahaha, ur tired too, remember.
Molly:  Yeah, also this is how it always works with a new school.  You start out hanging with whoever you happen to meet first, and eventually you magnet (sic) towards the people you'll actually like.
Liz:  Yupyupyup, my dorm group at Claremont were total losers.
Molly:  We're meeting with advisors now.
Liz:  Yeah, I think you have an advising hold.  Can't register you.  Sorry.  I'll keep trying.
Molly:  Thanks anyway mama.

9:30 am
Liz:  Been seen yet?
Molly:  No.  -.-  I'm gonna b the last of the last.
Liz:  Sorry boopie.

2:00 pm
Molly:  Bum buduh bum buduh bum BUM BUM, buduh bum buduh bum buduh bum bum bum, buduh bum buduh bum buduh bum bum BUUUM! bum, buduh bum bum bum.
Liz:  LOL
Molly: PS I need to refill my birth control prescription.
Molly:  Ever since orientation started/I've been slowly coming to see/All these people are retarded/None of them seem cool to me. (sent twice)

4:05
Molly:  Almostdonealmostdonealmostdone
Liz:  We r on our way!
Molly:  You might be early??
Liz:  Maybe, but traffic is fierce.
Molly:  I will go fill out my job application forms while I'm waiting.

5:05
Liz: Molllllllyyyyyyyy
Molly: I c u!!!

Orientation (Or hell on earth)

Yesterday I went to my school’s orientation. It was an overnight, from 8:00 in the morning till 5:00 the next night. I packed my backpack with pajamas, toiletries, and the only notebook I could find in my mostly packed room (A Star Wars notebook that said “Die Rebel Scum!” on the front). I had a vision of myself sitting in a modest, but clean and brightly lit dorm room, surrounded by friendly, laughing fellow freshmen, having a good time, before trooping off to sign up for interesting classes that would fulfill my GenEd requirements.

I arrived, bleary eyed and grumpy at 7:50, to find a line of people at least 100 strong outside the building where we were told to meet. I stood in this line, in the sun (it was already mid-80s, that early in the morning. I took this as a very bad sign), for a good twenty minutes. The boy standing in front of me was mildly interesting, but not twenty minutes worth of talking interesting, and I always find it kind of awkward to stop talking to someone in a line, because it’s not like you can walk away. You just have to kind of trail off whatever conversation you were having, and pretend to start texting someone, or start listening to your iPod, or become really fascinated with a patch of grass off to your left.

We finally got ushered into the building, and sorted into groups. Our orientation leader took us on a tour around the campus (it was mid-90s at this point), and led us in several icebreaker games that succeeded only in showing me how obnoxious and/or boring the rest of my group was. (I know I’m starting to sound like a bit of a Negative Nancy right now, but bear with me, I need the catharsis. I’m usually not this grumpy, I promise.) The rest of the day was filled with workshop after workshop seemingly named solely for the purpose of introducing alliteration to the freshmen (“Capture College!” “Get That Grade!”). The subject matter, unfortunately, was all basically the same. I was told to “be organized” four times, “budget your spending” fifteen, and I lost track of how many times someone told me to “get involved!”

The campus is pretty large, and I think they placed all consecutive activities on opposite sides of the campus on purpose, in order to weed out the weak. The only satisfaction I got all day was watching the girls that wore their best high heels try to power walk across grass when it was 101 degrees outside. Heh. That was fun. The activities that were planned for us at night were okay, so I listened to the amusingly horrible karaoke for a while, and then spent the rest of the time dancing or playing video games. We went back to our halls, the people who I thought might be okay friends went off to get wasted on the vodka someone had smuggled in, and I hurried to the shelter of my dorm. My roommate turned out to be okay, so we talked for a little while, and then I bought Cheetos and Skittles from one of the vending machines downstairs, and texted my boyfriend until I fell asleep.

The second day was filled with more boring lectures, and since I was very anxious about getting any of the classes I wanted (since freshmen register last, AND I was at the last orientation), I started to feel like I was going to rip my hair out. When the department head for my major, who was supposed to be taking us to sign up for classes, told us she was going to tell us “in detail, what we would be doing for the next four years”, I almost laughed. And man, when she said in detail she meant in detail. Luckily, I had put all the classes I wanted into my “shopping cart” the day before, and my mom (after a late night call from me) had logged into my account and was trying to get me those classes the second the counseling hold was taken off. As of now, I am only OFFICIALLY in two classes, one of which is just a b.s. class I added so that I’d be closer to the twelve units required to receive financial aid. I’m high on the waitlist for some of the classes I ACTUALLY want to take though (Like a beginning strings class! I’d learn to play violin!!), so cross your fingers for me!

Anyway, I’ve never, ever been happier to see my mom drive up. I got a giant Teriyaki burger from Carl’s Jr. afterwards (heaven), and life started to look semi-okay again. As of now I am feeling even more nervous for college than I was before, and even less excited. Isn’t that the opposite of what Orientation is supposed to do?

Professor and Mom

My name is Liz (“Hello Liz!”), and I am a helicopter parent.

Not really. I’m the mother of two loved and fussed-over children, and I’m also a professor at a state university in California. Which is not an easy thing to be right now, what with the California budget crisis and furloughs. All of us—faculty, staff, and students—are feeling put–upon, over-worked, and stressed. And now my little girl has decided to join our community as a college freshman.

Molly described her college application process quite accurately in her first blog post. She didn’t even send me her application essays to proofread. Because she wrote them at the last minute. Because she had a super important party to attend.

I had always hoped that my children would attend the same private liberal arts college that changed my eighteen-year-old life. I remained sanguine as Molly showed no signs of enjoying the math and science in which both her father and I have made our careers. I was even able to be supportive as her grades plummeted in direct, negative correlation with her increasing interest in boys. But when she was rejected from my alma mater, even though I had known all along that it was unlikely that she would be accepted, I cried.

My husband said “Isn’t it wonderful that she will be walking her own path, instead of following yours?” It took me a while to stop hating him for saying that.

I am honestly a little disappointed that Molly decided not to attend SFSU. She is right that we love the idea of her being closer to home and Cal Poly is a “better” school than SFSU. But I’m not sure it’s better for her, personally or professionally. And I was looking forward to having a place to crash in San Francisco.

We have decided to chronicle her first year in college, with regular postings from her as things happen and then my response as both a professor and a mother. I think it will help me see how the university looks from a young person’s perspective, which has become increasingly difficult to do over time. I hope it will also help her see things from her professors’ point of view—and that will help her have a successful and enjoyable time in college.  Which is all that most parents, helicopter or no, want for their child.

Pre-College Complications

Hi! I’m Molly, an intelligent, under-motivated, eighteen-year-old, almost–college student. I will be a freshman at Cal Poly Pomona in the fall. I will be living on campus, taking classes with friends from my high school, and will be less than an hour’s drive from my family and home. A week ago, I would have told you that I was going to be a freshman at San Francisco State University in the fall, living off-campus with two roommates I had never met, six hours away from anyone I knew, without a car or any experience with the San Francisco public transit system. A month ago, I would have told you that I was staying home for a year, working, and possibly taking some art classes at the local community college.

While it may sound like I’m really indecisive, the reason for all these changes of plan is actually because the colleges want to screw with me. Or at least, that’s what I’m telling everybody. Probably it has more to do with my inability to swiftly and effectively navigate college application bureaucracy—paying fees here, meeting deadlines there—all without any clear instruction. Or in my case, NOT paying fees and NOT meeting deadlines.

In junior high school, I was a powerhouse student, earning a 4.0 while submitting articles to online news sites, writing short stories, participating in several school clubs, and keeping a steady stream of paintings and sketches flowing into my online art portfolio. I tested into an International Baccalaureate program, and entered high school bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, vomiting enthusiasm onto anyone who would listen. Then . . . I got my first C+ (79.6%) in my freshman honors geometry class.

By sophomore year, I was a little disillusioned. By junior year I was really no longer trying. I failed pre-calculus my first semester, and my transcripts were not the spotless, shiny, straight-A things they had once been. Going to a difficult high school had pounded the motivation out of me, and I approached applying for colleges the same way I approached my senior year – lackadaisically.

I started off all right. I made a list of the colleges I was going to apply to, I signed up for an account on the College Board website, I sharpened my pencils and straightened the papers on my desk into neat little parallel piles. And then what? The magnitude of the task ahead hit me over the next few weeks like a slow-moving ton of bricks. Deadlines dawned, my confusion grew, and I could practically feel the noose of a community college and a career in the fast food business slipping around my neck. Every form I filled out seemed to lead to another.

I was walking, then running, then sprinting through a labyrinth of tax forms and volunteer hours, and essays on my paltry achievements (which I now realized were completely meaningless), while my friends seemed to be having no trouble at all. In fact, all of my friends turned in their college applications months, heck years, ago.

I think this process must be a lot of fun to watch from the outside. In fact, the main reason I want to have children is so that I can watch them struggle in their turn with the college application system. In the end though, it all got done. Not always well, and not always on time, but it got done. I applied to several Cal States and two of the Claremont colleges (more to indulge my parents than because I thought I had any chance of getting in). When the rejections and acceptances all came in, I decided I wanted to be a San Francisco State University Gator.

I went to Orientation, signed up for my classes, bought a raincoat. This was the point when my slacking during the application process caught up with me. Because I had submitted my application for housing late, the SFSU Housing Department told me it looked like I would be living on the streets this year. They hoped I had connections with local hobos, and was not too picky about what I would use as a blanket. I had a little panic attack, and after a lot of coaching and consoling from my mother, resigned myself to the idea of staying home and taking a couple of community college classes for a year, maybe focusing more on my painting and my job at Jamba Juice.

A couple of months later, I found an e-mail in my inbox from a girl with an apartment next door to SFSU. She’d seen my ad pleading for a place to stay on a roommate site, and she and her friend needed one more roommate for their apartment. So it looked like I was going to college after all! I started making lists of things I needed to buy, and packing up or giving away everything in my room.

I think a Cal Poly Pomona admissions officer had planted a camera in my room. They were watching me closely, and when I had taped up the last box filled with all my clothes, they gave the signal. I received an e-mail saying that I had been accepted to Cal Poly Pomona from the wait list. Also, they mentioned gleefully (which is a hard thing to get across in an e-mail, but they managed it) that Cal Poly Pomona’s start date was a full month after SFSU’s. Which meant, of course, that I would need to unpack all the clothes and books I had carefully packed away.

So now I had to choose between two very different options. San Francisco would be more of an adventure—it would be city life, new friends, far away from the safety net of my family. Cal Poly Pomona, however, was a better school, and the idea of living on campus appealed to the pack creature in me. After a weekend of my parents trying to disguise their blatant desire for me to stay close to home, and my boyfriend not trying to disguise it at all (he will be attending Cal Poly Pomona with me this year), I decided on the latter. And then I unpacked.