Hi All
This will be my first post and I hope I can be a regular on this great forum. I am in my mid thirties and I do have twin boys who are 4th graders. Me and my wife are from Europe and we live in the USA for the past 13 years. Neither me nor my wife attended college in USA. We are both engineers and we work at a Fortune 100 company here in New Jersey.
Today, we found out one of our friend's daughter wasn't admitted to any of her target schools. She applied to Columbia, Brown and Princeton along with some mid tier schools and she was admitted to NYU with no Merit Scholarship. Her parents were pretty upset when we spoke over the phone.
Me and my wife never really thought about college admissions for our kids as they are only 4th graders but today, after seeing the disappointment in our friend's eyes, I really got worried. Searched google a lit bit and here I am.
First off, I know it is still very early for us to even think about college. But unfortunately, college admission is not a sprint it is a journey. Not only grades or test scores impact the end result. As young parents of two little kids, what are some advice you could give us before we embark on this journey?
My main questions are below and I would like to thank in advance for all the replies.
1) Our kids are in public school now and we are trying to decide if we should start investigating private schools in New Jersey for middle school. We have some savings and we are financially OK to support private education in Middle School and High School. Which do you think is better for the kids academically and socially? We don't want to raise robots focused only on college admissions. We want our kids to have a nice journey until college both academically and socially.
2) Both me and my wife are competitive people. Both of us finished the Top College back in our country. But in our country, college admission was thru a SAT type centralized exam and only test scores and GPA was being considered. Extracurricular Activities, Essays were non existent. So we are really novice. We trust our kids will do OK in terms of GPA and SAT/ACT but how can we help them find what they like in life and pave the way for them so they can pursue the right activities?
3) Like I mentioned in #2, both of us are competitive and we don't want to create pressure on our kids for success. How did you guys balance this with your kids? We don't want to push them and nag them but we also don't want to be totally hands off. What are some suggestions to us at this point?
Thanks again for all answers and I will try to any questions you might have for us at this point.
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