Producer: Alright, welcome back to Full PreFrontal. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning my friend, what’s on tap for today?
Sucheta Kamath: My younger son is a freshman at Columbia University in New York City and he’s an engineering student, and we recently had an opportunity to visit the school and attend a parent council meeting in which many parents with their young students were there, I happened to sit next to this dynamic young junior at Columbia engineering school and I had a phenomenal conversation with her. I wanted to share what we talked about and I think that’s going to tee us up exactly what Nancy is going to talk about in her interview about how to become that self-advocating, future thinking young students who can take advantage of the college experience. This young woman told me that she was not quite sure whether she wanted to be a computer science engineer or she wanted to be an operational research engineer when she started college but her older sister who also went to the same school was a couple of years ahead of her gave this wonderful advice that no matter what you want to do, why don’t you start exploring for your summer internship? This was August, so before even she started as a freshman, her sister was giving her advice to look into summer internship, and of course, this young woman, her name is Tess, thought that was a ridiculous idea, and instead of blowing that off though, she did follow up, so she started sending applications to various companies including Microsoft where the requirements said you should be a computer science engineer or any field of engineering. She, mind you, had not even taken a single class in engineering. She had no idea what the job or the internship would involve but she just literally followed the advice and God forbid, she actually got a call for interview in October. Mind you, she’s a freshman in college and she has an interview with Microsoft. She went for the interview, she answered questions, one of the things she definitely reiterated that, “I do not have any experience but I’m very eager to learn whatever you teach.” Now, who doesn’t want that kind of young person working for you, right? And what looked promising to them, I completely see their point of view after I myself talking to her it was she was very engaging, very excited and very curious about life, and that was extremely enticing. Of course, within a month, she heard from Microsoft and she got an internship. So here we have a freshman in engineering school, zero experience in actual field of engineering, she probably in first two semesters will not be taking any engineering pertaining classes but she will be doing foundational classes, but she had lined up internship for herself. That kind of thought process where you come to campus by thinking that I belong here, I am thinking forward, I want to explore opportunities, and that mindset is, to me, what really makes or breaks a student’s life beyond high school. What important I’m going to share that she also said that her sister, sounds like a phenomenal mentor to me, also gave this advice that, “Why don’t you apply to anything and everything where qualification is you’re in college?” She said sure, so she started applying to scholarships, she started applying to internships, she started applying to research grants, and only criteria she met was she was an active student. None, no other qualifications she had and I asked her, “What was the logic behind it?” She said, “I’m a junior now and after applying to these places, a couple of places,” overtime began to know her and their response to her was, “We don’t have anything for you but come back later,” and guess what? In two consistent years, she followed up and third year, she had the internship, she had the scholarship, she had that offer that she was not qualified to begin with but eventually, she became. To me, that’s exactly what it takes to succeed in college, and I can tell you, folks are going to be excited listening to Nancy as she explains what builds your college success.
Producer: Boy, that is not how I did my college preparation. That’s very, very impressive. This promises to be yet another important conversation with Nancy Beane, so let’s tune into Sucheta and Nancy Beane.
Sucheta: Today, our guest is Nancy Beane. Nancy is the current president of the National Association for College Admission, and she’s also an associate director of college counseling at the Westminster schools, a prestigious private school here in Atlanta. Nancy started as a public school teacher for 15 years and then moved to Westminster where she has taught history for 26 years and also have done college counseling. Nancy has been celebrated for her outstanding contributions to the admission counseling, recognized for her inspiring leadership, and has been honored for showing dedication to her students and that she serves. In 2011, she received the Larry West award, a highest award given by the Southern Association for College Admissions Counseling. This year, she has one college award, southern region counselor of the year award. Nancy’s fervent belief is that if the person has a potential for a positive future and she has always encouraged her students to take advantage of opportunities for growth and development while believing in themselves. Just on interest of a full disclosure, I have had a privilege of seeing Nancy’s working action through the students we have shared together and as a college counselor, she has transformed my own son’s life with her loving guidance. So I can’t wait to have Nancy Beane as our guest today.
Welcome to the show, Nancy.
Nancy Beane: Thank you, it’s nice to be here.
Sucheta: So nice to have you. Well, we have been on many occasions talking about these complex issues of student’s success and helping student transition from high school to college. You yourself have helped my two young college kids and help them tremendously to pursue their goals and dreams. My question to you is, every parent and every teacher who has gotten into business of education would love to see students not only succeed because they are talented and capable but because they should care, and they should really pursue the higher education with the right mindset, and many occasions we find that does not happen, and I was curious if you can help us understand what factors that interfere with college success that we need to start thinking about helping them manage?
Nancy: I think there are a lot of factors. As I sit here, I think about some of my students who have gone off to college and for the first time, they’re having to manage their own lives and they have great difficulty with that. They’re used to parents or teachers or coaches, or someone telling them what they do all day long, what they can do, basically telling them when they had to be home at night, that kind of thing and college students often don’t have any restrictions. When I went to college, there were restrictions about when you had to be in and that kind of thing but not anymore. So students are totally on their own and I find that that’s a huge issue for some of them in terms of managing their own time and be able to get up in the morning and to do their work, and turn in their work on time. But I also think that a problem that occurs is that they’re scared sometimes. They’re not used to this and it’s like, “Oh my goodness, what am I supposed to do?” And they almost, some of them become paralyzed with figuring out what to do, and that can be a function that developmentally, in terms of either cognitively or emotionally, they are not ready, so there can be a lot of factors that are involved with this.
Sucheta: So let’s break this down one by one. So the fundamental skill that I see that goes into succeeding in college is coming prepared for classes. So what do you recommend students can do to really transition from high school where they may or may not come prepared or they may be prompted or coached, or propped by their parents. I mean, you and I have run into many situations where the parents have dropped the essay off or have brought their backpack, right? So what suggestions do you have for students to come prepared for college when they attend classes or live life on campus?
Nancy: Well, I’ve asked each student. I said, “Think through what helps you to be ready, so if you need to take a book or a notebook and write down, ‘I do this at 8 o’clock, I do this at 9 o’clock,’ if you need to write down particulars, then do it. If you need to – whatever it might be, whatever helps you to remember, record something to say, ‘Okay, tomorrow, I need to do these things,’” so frankly, for me, to do list is something good to have, so I find that a lot of students need to figure out particulars with that but it’s hard because they’ve never had to do it before.
Sucheta: So there are several things from training executive functions in my understanding and my own experience in this field for 25 years myself that making a list to execute or to follow, complete your goals requires a deep understanding of self and your own goals and you also need to have a good understanding of passage of time or calendar, or how weeks comprise into months, and how days comprise into weeks, and a lot of our students who struggle in this area have never connected time into those kinds of manageable chunks, do you see that?
Nancy: Oh, yes. I can remember a perfect example for myself. This actually was in graduate school but you hope the students learn this lesson much earlier. I had three papers due the very same day. From that day forward, those papers weren’t due the same day. The first one was two weeks before, the second was due a week before, and the third one was due that day, and I didn’t allow myself to have one minute pass that. I’m not sure I would have been able to do that at 18. I don’t know because I just hadn’t really focused on it nearly as much but I think that’s something that’s really important for students. They just need to figure out whatever their way is. When I’m talking to my students, I’ll say, “Look, you don’t seem that you want to deal with this. I don’t quite understand that. If you break your arm, are you going to just not deal with it because maybe it will get well?” And they go, “No, no, no, I’d go get my arm set.” I said, “Well, then why would you not deal with this?” “Well, it’s different because it’s not – I mean, I don’t quite understand it. I don’t know what’s going on so I don’t deal with it.” And I said, “Well, that’s probably one of the reasons you’re having trouble now,” and so we begin to talk about what might be best for them in terms of how they can figure out ways to deal with the issues they’re facing.
Sucheta: So this brings this a thought about, sounds like when we are dealing with these students who are not noticing this about themselves, somebody like you, somebody like me needs to observe this about them and feed that back into their brain, so this feedback loop of self-observation, self-correction, and self-sustenance is not there for those who don’t have greatest executive function, and what I find that constitutes to real failure once they come to college is they don’t have any advocates looking out for them, right? And they’re isolated, so what do you suggest that most of the students do not have relationship with their college counselor, counselors on campus, they don’t go to their professors, they don’t have the names or phone numbers of their TAs, so they’re operating like a little particle in the universe by themselves. Do you see that?
Nancy: Oh, yes, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems that they face. I think if they can understand, and I will tell my students, “We have come after you when you’re not doing well, we have weekly meetings, we talk about your issues that you’re facing, and I will come to your class and I will get you out of class if need be or I will text you and say you’ve got to come in and see me.” I tell mine that, “When you get to college, professors care. There are plenty of people in the counseling center that care but they’re not coming after you to get you to do what you need to do, so this is where you’ve got to take the action to go see them. There are so many people willing to help – there’s a disabilities law now that says that they have to help you if you have a certain psychological profile that you’ve been tested or whatever and you have ADHD or you have a learning difference or you have other reasons, if they are supposed to by law help you, they have to do that but they’re not going to come and get you. You’ve got to take the opportunity to go to them.” If they simply will get over there, and I can think of examples where they’ve done it and I’ve had a superb experience, and I can think of examples where they haven’t done it and it’s really been difficult.
Sucheta: So how do we, in your experience, make these students seek? In my experience, executive function is lack of insight and lack of awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses, and particularly, difficulty in redirecting one’s own psychological makeup to seek, and when that happens, like the verbal advice that you and I give may not translate into action, right? Because these students don’t believe, I mean, I cannot tell you a number of occasions my college kids have told me that “My professor doesn’t like me” or “I don’t like the professor because he has a thick accent.” I’ve been told that “My TA is dumb.” So how do we work around this issue when the students who are in dire need to get the help from the institutions that are designed to help them but they are judgmental of it? They are very harsh critics of the whole system. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Nancy: Well, all of us have our issues. Every single human being I know has an issue and so we’ve got to figure out what our own issues are, and I think my bottom line is just to look at myself and have others look at themselves and say, “No excuse. You’ve got an issue, you need to solve that problem, whatever it is and so figure out a way to solve it, and just sitting on the problem or not doing anything, that’s a solution and it’s not going to be a good one, so make sure that you do think through, what is it about my life that’s not working very well? If I made a C in the class or an action in the class, is that the professor’s fault?” And no, we don’t all like our professors or we don’t all like our teachers, or we don’t all like our bosses but we better figure out how to work with them because deciding that we’re just simply not going to do it is going to result, as I said, in a situation you don’t want. So I think it’s really important for them to operate under that ‘no excuses’ motto. It’s my job to figure out A, where to solve my problem.
Sucheta: Beautiful. So Nancy, tell us how you foresee our students who have shown signs of executive function problems throughout their high school career and now are getting ready for college and they have failed to develop these independent study strategies, that means they do understand that they should probably take notes, they do understand they probably should read on their own before they show up for classes, they do understand that they need to rewrite their notes so they become more comprehensible, but they don’t do it necessarily? So what can we implement that can help our students?
Nancy: I think if students really understood just how much help is out there, actually, I went to a program that the University of Georgia did here several years ago and they brought different students with them who had agreed to share their stories with us, and so there was one student who was a former Westminster student who had ADHD and he said, “I don’t know what I’d do without this center. They have actually found somebody to take my notes for me in my class and then to go over those notes with me,” so there are people who can do recordings, there are people who can take notes for you, there are people that can do whatever you need. There was a young lady there who had Crohn’s disease and needless to say, she couldn’t – disabilities or issues could take all sorts of forms. They may not be academic. They may be physical or emotional, and so this young woman knew how to touch base with people and I think the biggest thing is for me a relationship. If I had my way, every single student, the minute he or she gets on campus and actually before you actually enroll, if I had my way, they would go to see someone, get themselves established with that person or people, learn what the possibilities are for getting help, and then when they get ready to take the classes, they know what to do. So if they feel a test or if they have other issues, then they can get some help that they need. So I think that’s the biggest piece of advice we give them for the transition and it’s not just the students with executive functioning. It’s all of our students.
Sucheta: I think, Nancy, you and I talked about a common student that we both helped and that was one of the most powerful advice, I think it really strengthened my work with him because you gave the same advice. One is to develop these relationships and what I have found that if we look at executive functions and the way they impact cognitive development of the brain, these students genuinely lack the ability to inhibit and one of the inhibition skills is that your social emotional control, that means not to get upset too much, not to talk too much, not to dismiss people too much, and so when these tendencies that we have, when we rein them in, that’s what self-regulation looks like, and a lot of the students have not practiced that but when they begin to practice that, and I have found that if they have a relationship with one or two people on their college campus that becomes a motivating reason to rein in those attitudes and behaviors that may not be most favorable, like you said, we don’t need to love our boss but we need our boss to respect us and we don’t need to love our professors but we need our professor to give us a chance, and those students will recognize that do so much better.
Nancy: Oh, no question.
Sucheta: So my question then is, what can we do as a culture? Where do you see parents fit in this equation? Like if you had to give advice to the graduating class will have three months before they go to college themselves, what can parents do to kind of inculcate or support, or nurture these habits of developing better relationship with the world in which they are going to navigate?
Nancy: That’s a little bit of a toughie because I think there’s so many different things that can be done, depending on your relationship with your job, you may have some conversations about it. Now, some parents are going to say, “I expect you to do so and so and put that kind of thing.” Other parents are going to say, “We really need to talk about this. This is something I see that you’ve had a lot of trouble with.” For some families, they just need outside help because the students, like, “I don’t want to talk to you, mom. You don’t really know what you’re talking about.” Doesn’t matter whether the mom does or not, that students going to say that, so sometimes, going to see someone that can help them navigate these waters, so to speak, of what they need to do it and how they need to do it. So I think it’s recognizing that it’s like anything else we talk about in life. Recognizing an issue or problem that you have and being willing to take the steps to solve it, and frankly, I’ll be honest with parents. If the students are not ready to solve it, it can take a while. That goes back to my suggestion in an earlier podcast about maybe taking a gap year and figuring out what is it that I need to do to get myself ready for college. Just because your friends are going, doesn’t mean it’s the thing for you to do that year. Definitely want you to go back because the dad is out there that you’re going to do a lot better career wise if you’ve had an education.
Sucheta: And to your point, I think I can see these conversations are not to be had the summer of your entry to college point. [laughing] This needs to happen way before, maybe from beginning of high school.
Nancy: Well, it does, and it doesn’t have to be the parent child. It can be a brother, a sister, it can be an aunt or an uncle. It can be somebody that they trust, Boy Scout leader or somebody that’s been an adviser in a religious organization, or whatever it is. Somebody that they can trust , that maybe you can feel as a parent that you can say, “You know, this is something we’re concerned about.” Now, colleges do, one thing parents need to understand is once your child turns 18, they do not have to give you permission to see their grades or to get anything or other information about them.
Sucheta: Do you have certain recommendations what parents must do?
Nancy: Yes, I think if I were a parent, I would say, “Would you like for me to continue to help pay for this college education? You will sign that form and I will see your grades. Otherwise, if you figure out how to go because I’m not going to do it,” so I think that’s really important
Sucheta: And that’s not too mean.
Nancy: I don’t think that’s too mean at all.
Sucheta: I agree with you.
Nancy: Yes, so that’s one thing. So this is still a family effort. College is expensive and we –
Sucheta: And expensive mistake if you flunked the first year or whatever.
Nancy: Yes, exactly, and one of the things I want to say and I do say to my students is, “If you can establish a good record from the beginning,” I mean, I get a little frustrated or concerned about fraternities and sororities. I think they’re fine, they’re good social groups and they can be wonderful, but for some of the students during the pledging, particularly for the guys’ fraternities, their time gets taken up and they’re not focusing on their academic work, and if you start out with a really low GPA, it is very difficult to pull that GPA up, so if you can form some good study habits in the beginning, frankly, go to college a little scared, not sure what you’re doing, get your grounded self in order, and then you will be able to pull back, so don’t try to join every single organization that you see out there from the beginning. Don’t try to do every activity because that can be a formula for disaster. You’re there to learn, to study, to achieve goals that you have for ultimately getting a job, finding meaning in life, and so forth. We want you to have a good time but we also want you to be responsible with having that good time.
Sucheta: Perfectly said, so tight all of these factors that you just described to your national initiative. As a president, how is your organization addressing some of these challenges and how are you helping your college counselors who are members of the organization?
Nancy: Well, we’re very concerned about mental health challenges that we are seeing from students about academic success or lack of success. We’re seeing students who go to community colleges who are not finishing. That can be socioeconomically related, there can be all sorts of factors. We are seeing students in four-year schools and sometimes, they’re not completing either, so we are really trying to work with our students but also with our counselors, both those on the high school level and those in the college, to say, “What can we do to make sure that there’s this much success as possible?” There was a woman named Dr. Frances Jensen who is at the University of Pennsylvania who has written materials on the development of the teenage brain and she talks about how the frontal lobe is not really developed until the student’s about 25, and she’s great because it’s not an easy, easy book all the way through but she relates it to her own sons and particularly, she’s got some what I call hilarious stories in there, it wouldn’t be hilarious if it were my child but for somebody else’s child, it can be –
Sucheta: I enjoyed her came to Westminster last year.
Nancy: Yes, she was great. And so we had her come to our national convention and speak about that. We’ve had some workshops that we try to do and so it’s been really quite good but we are very concerned and we are trying to find ways to make sure that we do work in this arena, do more. We’re hearing from the colleges that far more students are coming to counseling centers now than they used to have. That can be for substance abuse, it can be for –
Sucheta: That’s a good step.
Nancy: It can be for sexual assaults, it can be for learning problems, it can be for all sorts of things, but perceive that there are more issues that seem to be coming to life.
Sucheta: So as we get ready to wrap up, tell me, what are you most hopeful about? What makes you excited about your job and your role? What makes you so optimistic about what you do?
Nancy: I’ve taught in every kind of school, I’ve taught kids that were very wealthy socio-economically, kids who didn’t have anything at all financially, and I have seen bright students in every single place I’ve worked and students who were wonderful, who are making changes in this world or will make changes in this world and I am excited about the next generation. I’m excited about what can be done. We have a lot of issues in the world that need solving and I think if students will have that grit and from everything I’m understanding, there’s another professor of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Angela Duckworth who says grit and has written a book on grit that that’s the difference in students being able to be successful and not successful, so I’m excited about it. I’m reaching retirement age but not ready to quit yet because I love what I do and I enjoy working for the students and seeing the successes they have, and I’ve seen many students who appeared not to be able to have success who have gone on to college and got onto work and have ended up being incredibly successful in finding that meeting in life that we hope all we’ll find.
Sucheta: Thank you so much for your incredible wisdom and insight and I’m sure our audiences are really going to enjoy, so Nancy, before I let you go, should anyone have any questions or want to learn about your work, where can they reach you?
Nancy: I’m more than happy for them to have my email address. It’s nancybeane@westminster.net, so that’s nancybeane@westminster.net. So it’s Westminster, not Westminister.
Sucheta: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Nancy, for making the time to join me on my podcast.
Nancy: Thank you, I enjoyed it.
Producer: Alright. Well, Sucheta, another great conversation with Nancy Beane, very insightful. Let’s talk about some of the factors that interfere with college transition and success.
Sucheta: So we talked about this earlier and I’m just going to reiterate what I found very interesting and relevant since we are going to talk more about how to help the students transition better, but the fundamental roadblock that’s going to be created is students not being prepared because they don’t know what to anticipate, and they don’t know how working independently and working by keeping your goals in mind and managing your time and understanding all the temptations that exist on college campus need to be navigated with the perspective of what is the reason I am here and how do I achieve and maintain success in spite of all these wonderful distractions and how do I grow as a person, how do I grow as a student, and how do I balance it all, and so those are the kinds of factors that really help in transitioning into becoming more successful as a young learner, as a young adult learner, and not everybody’s good at that.
Producer: Right, right. Well, what Nancy was saying was, it seems obvious now as I listen to the conversation but college readiness is not just not as simple as it sounds, right?
Sucheta: Yes, truly. Nancy laid the foundation as to what helps in transitioning to college. For example, her first takeaway was the fact is that college readiness is a three-tier readiness. The first part of that is psychological readiness which is, do I want to go to college or am I not really interested or committed and do I have a burnout or am I excited about college? The second part she was saying was the academic readiness, and academic readiness is not just the capacity to do mental weightlifting, like am I smart, am I capable to do the reasoning and problem-solving? But more so, am I prepared to, do I have the discipline to wake up a certain time, do I have the capacity to not go to a party when I have papers due? That kind of readiness, but the real readiness is the executive function readiness. Far often, it gets neglected and it’s not top of the heap for everybody, primarily because we don’t call executive function as a special skill to be learned and mastered and achieved before you enter college, it’s not even part of the curriculum or is not taught formally. Of course, there are some students who are intuitive about it, some students work hard at it, and some students are just not good at it and they never get good at it simply by being bad at it, so my suggestion is, everyone wants their teenager to take responsibility for their success but the question is, how do we do that?
Producer: Well, what it sounds like Nancy’s really saying is, she wants her students to get to know themselves well before they ever enter the college world, yes?
Sucheta: That’s exactly was the second Takeaway. She was talking about students and need to figure out what works for them. She didn’t just mean figure out what classes to take or whether to live in a quad or a single room, those kinds of decisions, but how to go through college in general, like all four years of college and she wants students to think at a micro level and this micro level is more about the daily aspects of managing that life, as managing that a week at a time, and managing your schoolwork in increments, leading up to midterms, and then leading up to finals. What I gather from all that is, students really need to get better at tailoring the tools to their own life and they need to do that as soon as they arrive. They need to use not just one system but as many systems that they can think of and they need to invent some or they need to mimic some.
Producer: Well, I really appreciate it, what Nancy said about how all of us frankly need to know how to work with others and how to work around roadblocks.
Sucheta: Yes, that’s the kind of be in charge of your problem that she was talking about. This was the third Takeaway I feel our listeners will really appreciate, that one must adopt a no excuse motto. When you are running into a difficulty, when your work is not getting done, and when you’re having difficulty understanding expectations, a lot of college students or even high school students, or students in general may run into this mindset and that this is really not me, it’s my professor, it’s the class, it’s the teacher, it’s the TA, it’s the system, and so when you are in that mode, you’re just sitting and basking in the problem and not really taking any charge of your solution, so Nancy really was talking about admitting to yourself that things are not really working for you and not solving a problem is one kind of solving problems but it doesn’t really work too well. In my experience, I agree with Nancy that we must learn truly to work with the different kinds of people by really adjusting and changing ourselves because in life, we’re going to have bosses and teachers and professors, and even in-laws as you can see who may not be the people we get along with but we have to work with people, and working with people is an art and that can only happen if you become in charge of your own challenges and difficulties by saying to yourself, “I will not excuse myself.”
Producer: Well, another key takeaway for me from the conversation was the discussion where Nancy wants a student to work to build relationships on campus. Talk about that a bit.
Sucheta: Yes, so I saw that as a self advocacy takeaway. She highly emphasized that each and every student needs to know that college is definitely not like high school. No one is seeking that college student out to see, is he okay? “Are you succeeding? Are you attending your classes? Hey, do you have any zeros in your assignments? Do you want me to help you with your professor?” Those kinds of nudges may be offered by high school counselors. She herself described that she even kind of goes to the high school students class. She calls him out and she says, she tells him when to come and meet her. She even sends a text and that kind of is the act of a very loving and caring college counselor but that also is more possible in a smaller environment of a high school or a college counselor may have just 200 students or maybe 100 students, or 40 students, or maybe 20 students. It’s really not possible on college campus to mimic that. Even though as I had mentioned earlier that all the schools are required to help students, it’s the student who has to take the action. The law exists that the students with disabilities need to be supported but these students with disabilities need to go to that department or that office where those services are offered, and many of my students and same with Nancy experiences, is those students who need this kind of help will have executive function problems are not the one who are seeking. I really liked her suggestion that as soon as you arrive on campus, get established with someone, that means go and meet with maybe advisor, learn as many ways and as many possibilities of getting help, and doing that it kind of demystifies that college process for that student but I know why this may be hard for some students, because many students find that process either intimidating or it those who are unaware of their talent just may even find it unnecessary, but that’s where it lies the real truth of success, is how do you establish a relationship with your campus.
Producer: Well, that was certainly a step I did not take in my college career early on and I wish I had. I think it’s really great advice, so we’ve talked a lot about different ways for students need to take action, but Nancy also had some really good suggestions for what parents can do. Talk about that a bit.
Sucheta: Yes, and I think in this Takeaway, she certainly talks about college is a family affair. When a student goes to college, whole family goes through the experience of that college-bound student, and what I mean by that is, it’s not literally following that student in college but it really being a moral support for that student. College is an expensive proposition and it’s an expensive mistake when one does not handle it well, so the kids need to give a permission to parents to see their grades or to be able to communicate with the authorities on the college campus, and many students are extremely reluctant to include their families and parents in that process or in this affair, and then they create a strong predicament for themselves. So I like the way she was also emphatic about telling the parents to kind of just remind the students that they are the ones who are paying for the college and they have the right to get to know the students performance or have access to it and getting the child to sign or that college students signed the form so that they can see that great to be part of the mandatory or mutual understanding for the family. Nancy also described different kinds of family experiences and she says, there are some parents have strong and strict rules, how often you should communicate, what kind of expectations you have, and many students oblige those family members. She also however talked about those families who don’t even discuss the college experience and students feel no obligation to communicate anything to the parents regarding their challenges and welfare until they run into crisis. Some families really go through trouble and they need more formal supports such as an outside expert but it certainly is a family affair and as many people with wisdom we can get involved can really help that student.
Producer: Yes. Thinking also about the college campus life , the social aspect of it obviously [laughing] can also, I think, a lot of people can be a problem. There was some discussion between you and Nancy about ways to navigate the social life.
Sucheta: And that does bring us to the last or the sixth Takeaway. Nancy was a big proponent of performing good first and then worrying about constructing a social life. Sometimes, the biggest struggle in college is having a good time while knowing how to be responsible with yourself because that balancing act may not be easy to master. She was pretty clear with her advice that get your ground itself in order first and don’t be so sure that you know everything about college. Go there a little bit scared, go there with this feeling that, what if I don’t know what I don’t know? And that student who is slightly scared and intimidated is going to be pleasantly cautious. She also was a big proponent of students not jumping into all activities, so committing to all the fun things all at once. She asked the students to be more cautious about their time consuming social endeavors such as rushing, she believes the colleges that promote that in the second semester or the first semester are much wiser and offering that to these immature or inexperienced students who don’t even know who they are in the context of college. She did warn the student that was the GPA drops, pulling a low GPA is a nightmare and that is something students need to be worried about. Many students don’t take that first semester, first year, that seriously and spend the rest of their semester’s regretting that wish the outcome was a little bit different. Finally, I do think that she talked about our schools need – our children, our college-bound students need to be really aware what is the ultimate reason they are in college. They are there to achieve goals which will lend them a good job but ultimately, that will help them find meaning, so this is all about finding meaning and what are we doing to find meaning is how deeply and meaningfully we are connecting to that life that they’re living in college, even though, can be a challenging landscape to navigate, but that’s the best part of going to college, is to achieve that self-discovery. So I hope students and parents understand this complex process and its relationship to executive functions because that’s what the crux of the matter is of self management.
Producer: Well, let’s wrap up today’s conversation about executive functions and how this conversation with Nancy Beane ties in with your work there.
Sucheta: Yes, it does bring us back to this relationship between college bound students experience and executive functions or college readiness and executive functions. What is commonly known as fluid intelligence in fact executive function which is using sound reasoning to solve problems, but not just any ordinary problem. These problems are problems related to self. That means, how do I solve problems that I faced for my future by changing me? And that’s how I see executive functions relating to college experience. How do we bring improvement in ourselves and see our own welfare, and really work towards long-term outcomes is what matters on college campus. I mean, it matters in every aspect of life but those students who have, for the first time, learned to be by themselves and they are taking decisions for themselves, they are managing their own learning, they are managing their academics, they’re managing their social endeavors, and they need to choreograph the best success for themselves, and that success depends on that self oriented thinking to manage outcomes for their future. Most experts agree that executive functions are critical for academic achievement. If a society in general and culture of higher education specifically wants its students to thrive between enrollment and graduation, it needs to take executive functions seriously, and know the different parts of the human behavior such as planning, learning by observing, studying, daily habits, are fundamentally related and they are a reflection of executive functions. So let’s not start babying our college-bound students through college experience. Let’s prepare our college-bound student well. Let’s not call these behaviors study habits but let’s call them rather steady habits. Let’s teach them to work hard, focus on learning to learn, and interpersonal challenges with grace. I hope that can be a very good lesson for all of our listeners.
Producer: Alright. Another great conversation with Nancy Beane. Alright, that’s it for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at the Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.