College Checklist
If your child will be going away to school, there are several skills they would benefit from learning in advance. If they're going to a university, they should learn them during high school - if they're going to a community college, you have more time to teach them, but they nonetheless need teaching. Here are some skills it may be useful to prepare before your child goes off to college to increase their shot at succeeding there and, later on down the road, making a successful transition to an independent life.
1. Roommate skills
Skills needed to get along with roommates, such as compromising and good hygiene are probably best to prepare before your child is ever in a roommate situation and needs them. While your instinct may be to have your child live without a roommate, the adviser at my school's students with disabilities office, Mr. Bryson, actually encouraged a roommate. It's a great opportunity to practice social skills before going out into the "real world" and can keep someone involved in campus life.
2. Driving/Taking the bus
While large universities do tend to be microcosms in their own right, that is, they have most everything a person could need within walking distance on campus, it's still important that your child learn how to drive or take the bus before they leave home. Why? Because this is the time that they're around for you to teach them. Once they leave for college, it's difficult, if not impossible, to teach those skills. Since these are important skills for cultivating independence, it's important to make sure your child learns them now.
3. Email/Phone skills
Email and phone skills are essential for university life (and life as a whole). Schools assign emails to their students and they are expected to check and often reply to emails from the school email account. Phone skills are important for setting up appointments for different services on campus. An added bonus is that these skills will help your child be able to keep in touch with you when they're gone.
4. Ability to interact with university professionals
Naturally, the skill of being able to talk to professors, advisers, and more on campus (preferably without offending them) takes some work, but is quite necessary. Try having your child set up and take the lead role in appointments on campus. For example, when you go to students with disability services to deliver documentation you might let your child take the lead in the appointment. I highly recommend that they set up their own appointment with disability services for when they start school, as well. That way, should something go wrong on campus, they have a safety net already set up. Self-advocacy is a huge skill for independence, and there's a great deal of overlap between the two skills; in fostering one, you're fostering the ability to develop the other.
5. Directional skills
This advice comes directly from my mother. Make sure your child can navigate around campus. Our family set up a method, almost like a game, for helping my sister learn her way around before she even got to school. We visited the campus many times (it was local) before she attended. We picked three target locations in strategic locations to my sister to learn, preferably all in different parts of campus. In my sister's case we chose the dorms, the library, and the student union. The three of them made a triangle that she could use to get her way around campus; maybe she didn't know where her specific class building was, but if she knew it was near the library she could get close to it and then ask for directions. Even if she got hopelessly lost trying to get somewhere new, since her dorm was one of the places we chose, she could always find her way back to the security of her home away from home.
Here's how to do it. As you're walking around campus on visits (presumably doing other things, like meeting with students with disabilities services), quiz your child on where each area is. Whenever you're walking on campus, ask your child to point to where those three buildings are from whatever area you happen to be at. They should always be able to point to those three locations. When you go to any building, have them do the navigating. Even if they get lost, you're just there to be supportive; encourage them to ask other students for directions instead of stepping in and doing it for them.
1. Roommate skills
Skills needed to get along with roommates, such as compromising and good hygiene are probably best to prepare before your child is ever in a roommate situation and needs them. While your instinct may be to have your child live without a roommate, the adviser at my school's students with disabilities office, Mr. Bryson, actually encouraged a roommate. It's a great opportunity to practice social skills before going out into the "real world" and can keep someone involved in campus life.
2. Driving/Taking the bus
While large universities do tend to be microcosms in their own right, that is, they have most everything a person could need within walking distance on campus, it's still important that your child learn how to drive or take the bus before they leave home. Why? Because this is the time that they're around for you to teach them. Once they leave for college, it's difficult, if not impossible, to teach those skills. Since these are important skills for cultivating independence, it's important to make sure your child learns them now.
3. Email/Phone skills
Email and phone skills are essential for university life (and life as a whole). Schools assign emails to their students and they are expected to check and often reply to emails from the school email account. Phone skills are important for setting up appointments for different services on campus. An added bonus is that these skills will help your child be able to keep in touch with you when they're gone.
4. Ability to interact with university professionals
Naturally, the skill of being able to talk to professors, advisers, and more on campus (preferably without offending them) takes some work, but is quite necessary. Try having your child set up and take the lead role in appointments on campus. For example, when you go to students with disability services to deliver documentation you might let your child take the lead in the appointment. I highly recommend that they set up their own appointment with disability services for when they start school, as well. That way, should something go wrong on campus, they have a safety net already set up. Self-advocacy is a huge skill for independence, and there's a great deal of overlap between the two skills; in fostering one, you're fostering the ability to develop the other.
5. Directional skills
This advice comes directly from my mother. Make sure your child can navigate around campus. Our family set up a method, almost like a game, for helping my sister learn her way around before she even got to school. We visited the campus many times (it was local) before she attended. We picked three target locations in strategic locations to my sister to learn, preferably all in different parts of campus. In my sister's case we chose the dorms, the library, and the student union. The three of them made a triangle that she could use to get her way around campus; maybe she didn't know where her specific class building was, but if she knew it was near the library she could get close to it and then ask for directions. Even if she got hopelessly lost trying to get somewhere new, since her dorm was one of the places we chose, she could always find her way back to the security of her home away from home.
Here's how to do it. As you're walking around campus on visits (presumably doing other things, like meeting with students with disabilities services), quiz your child on where each area is. Whenever you're walking on campus, ask your child to point to where those three buildings are from whatever area you happen to be at. They should always be able to point to those three locations. When you go to any building, have them do the navigating. Even if they get lost, you're just there to be supportive; encourage them to ask other students for directions instead of stepping in and doing it for them.
These are merely a few examples given from personal experience and what worked for my family. Naturally, what works for your family will vary given the particulars of your own situation, but I hope that you found these suggestions useful!