@Taylor | Student | The best advice I would give fellow students starting the college journey is...

@Phil | Parent | The best advice I would give parents starting the college journey...

Click here to reply to @Phil [https://www.swellcast.com/Phil/4bafd64c-d200-4151-b7b7-24f7b94a43e8?utm_source=swellcommunitypodcast&utm_medium=swellepisodereply] "It is going to take a lot of work for everybody involved. You know, putting undue pressure on a student, I think, is unnecessary. And they're already facing a lot of pressure. There's grades, there's scores, test scores, and then there's the selection process itself. And you add on top of that, social pressures where their friends are going, where their boyfriend or girlfriend is going, all puts undue pressure on the student, and they don't need any more."

@Phil | How we started to narrow down the selection process...

Click here to reply to @Phil [https://www.swellcast.com/Phil/b2b1943a-27a4-4f48-b2a6-d8fc60cf8a3a?utm_source=swellcommunitypodcast&utm_medium=swellepisodereply] "Now, as parents, you have to think about this as adjustments. There's going to be an adjustment period. No matter what happens, going from high school to college, you have to understand what situation your child might struggle in, what situation your student may thrive in. Once I heard my daughter say that, I realized we should really be looking at smaller schools. I'm glad we did. But that was really kind of the starting point of really narrowing down this discussion."

@Phil | Parent | How I started my high schooler's journey to college selection...

Click here to reply to @Phil [https://www.swellcast.com/Phil/bddcf1b4-8cf2-49a3-8b8f-5f0677f04d03?utm_source=swellcommunitypodcast&utm_medium=swellepisodereply] "I went from a high school on the east coast to a huge state college in the midwest, and I felt out of place. I felt like because it was a state college, everybody was from the state there, and they knew each other, or at least they knew somebody from the town that they were at that they could begin a discussion. And I felt out of place."

@Taylor | How we started to narrow down the selection process...

Click here to reply to @Taylor [https://www.swellcast.com/Taylor/90aa04ea-b6f0-4bdf-a9c3-5b1d70f8e4ce?utm_source=swellcommunitypodcast&utm_medium=swellepisodereply] "How to narrow down the selection process. That was pretty easy in my house, given the rising cost of education. I knew that I did not want to go to an out of state school. I wanted to stay in my home state and go to one of the incredible schools that it has to offer. A lot of people feel that, you know, in order to have a true college experience, you need to go far away or your school needs to be one of the big name schools."

@Taylor | Student | The best advice I would give fellow students starting the college journey is...

Click here to reply to @Taylor [https://www.swellcast.com/Taylor/b6fa2806-e234-4bbe-8af0-cbe952d90041?utm_source=swellcommunitypodcast&utm_medium=swellepisodereply] "My dad couldn't even dream of going to college when he was a child. The country that he came from, it just wasn't something that was in the cards for him. And to be the first person in my family to go to college, to have the support of my family, to have them there with me the day that I moved in, it all felt so incredible."