S3E5: How to Respond to Disciplinary Trouble During College Applications
Today's question of the week- "How do I recover from disciplinary trouble?"
LISTEN NOW
Today's question of the week- "How do I recover from disciplinary trouble?"
In today's episode, Thomas advises families and students on how to proceed with college application preparation in the wake of a serious disciplinary issue.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media @admittedlypodcast for a chance to get featured.
About Thomas
Thomas is a parent and alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was director of admissions and financial aid at Wharton School. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to create the best possible MBA class.
Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities, he works with diverse and underserved communities to help them become successful college students. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
Follow Admittedly on Social Media
TikTok: @admittedlypodcast
Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
-
Hello, and welcome to the Admittedly podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Caleel, and today we're going to talk about something not many people want to talk about, and that's what happens if you get in trouble during your high school career. I'm not talking about you pulled a prank and had to sit in detention. I'm talking about real trouble. I'm talking about the kind of trouble that gets you suspended, the kind of trouble that gets you kicked out, the kind of trouble where you have to withdraw. Does this apply to everyone? No, but I'm seeing it occur more and more often I'm getting a lot of questions about it.
And the reality is that it happens and it's devastating. It's devastating to the student. It's devastating to the community. It's devastating to the parents. And it's something I think that we need to address because a lot of what happens is, in the world of admissions, is that people think that this is a quest for perfection.
Right? Who gets admitted to the best schools? The perfect students. And certainly, as you look around, it can seem that way. Right, it can seem that all these students are just going through their life, and everything's hunky dory, and they're not facing any trials or tribulations, and those are the only kinds of students that get in.
And I want to remind you, for those of you who have taken statistics, what is your N, right? You have a very small sample size. You're looking around, you're looking at people who are in your immediate vicinity, and you're maybe seeing people online. And what do people post online?
They post their best-curated version of themselves. And so, there are students who are out there who are facing significant difficulties. And is that an immediate death sentence in admissions? It's not. What is a death sentence though is failing to fully own and address that. So, there are a couple things that need to happen.
First of all, we want to take a moment and look at this process from the perspective of the admissions officers, right? They take this job. And I've talked about this before, but I think it's very important to reiterate this. They take this job. It is a stressful job. It is generally a thankless job is an extremely low-paying job.
Okay. It sounds great, right? I am recruiting all kinds of future admissions officers here. But it is a very difficult job, but they do it because they really love the process. They believe in the process and they love the impact that they can have on students lives. It's critical to understand that.
The admissions officers are actually rooting for you. Right? I know it seems like they're not because they, part of their job is saying no, but in reality, that every time they open one of those files, they really want to believe in you. They really want to pull for you. They want to see your best self and what your best self is, is really a kind of self aware mature understanding of where you are and where you want to go.
Did you get in trouble? Did you, you know, get suspended? Did you get dismissed from school? Did you have to withdraw? This is an important part of your story. I hear from a lot of students in this predicament. They say, well, I don't want that to define me. That's not who I am. Completely understood. It is absolutely not who you are, but it is a part of who you are, and it's a critical part of your journey and how you became the person you are now.
So the most important thing, right, as these things happen is the ability to own that. Okay, now that takes time. I am not a trained therapist. I don't pretend to be. I want you to take my advice with a grain of salt. But the first thing is once we've moved past the trauma and the shock and everything that goes around that is being able to step back and do the very hard work to understand what happened, understand why you made the choices that you did, and own that process, right?
Because you can't fake it. I've read a lot of very surface-level essays saying, “Oh, I got suspended because we pulled a prank. I made a bad decision. Everything's fine now.” And that is not an effective way to address that because we all understand you don't want to dwell on it, right? But the question is, okay, what actions did you take afterwards?
How did you make amends? How did you redeem yourself? How did you do the work to accept your role and your responsibility and then move forward from that? That's what the school is really looking at. And depending on what you did, sometimes, I just had this conversation with a student, there sometimes needs to be a redemptive component to your actions afterwards.
So let's say that you fell in with the wrong crowd. You were insecure and you were bullying a student, right? You were bullying a student with a group of other students. You got caught, you got suspended. Okay. Plenty of people have made that mistake and hopefully most of them learn from it.
Right? And the question will be not just what happened, what was the punishment, but what did you do to change? What did you do to make amends? And also, what have you done since then? Are you contributing to anti-bullying efforts in your school? Did you help, uh, start an anti-bullying club? Are you part of an anti-bullying awareness group?
Right? Not as kind of self-flagellation, but sharing your message, showing that maturity, moving forward. You don't need to do that forever. But we want something where you can kind of step back and say, Hey, not only did I learn my lesson, but I really wanted to make an effort to make sure nobody else made the same mistakes.
Because what a lot of students, almost all students don't realize, is that when somebody like me opens a file, we see where you're trying to hide something. We may not know what it is that you're trying to hide, but you can't maintain seamless continuity across the entirety of the application. The applications are designed that way.
And if we see something that concerns us, even a little bit, right, and there's no explanation for it, we don't have the time to go in and dig. We're certainly not going to call you and say, “Hey, Thomas, we noticed a little something here. Can you explain that?” Right? That's not the way this works. It's really a, you know, “thank you, next” kind of a situation.
But if we read an essay that says, “Boy, I really messed up, played a prank. Knew better, but went along with it because I was feeling insecure. I was trying to fit in, really learned my lesson. You know, I had to work all summer to pay for that statue that we destroyed, or monument that needed to be cleaned up or whatever it is that we did.”
Things like that. Certainly that is a much different arc than, oh, this happened and I'm just trying to forget about it. Okay. Another question that I get is, what if I have an arrest? Okay, what if I got arrested? If you're a juvenile, generally that doesn't need to be disclosed, except in certain cases, and I would encourage you to really look carefully at what the requirements are in the application.
Some of you, however, might be very proud of your arrest. I work with a lot of students who are fierce advocates on all levels. Kinds of different issues and they're proud that they did a sit-in and were arrested that they were protesting for equal rights or Black Lives Matter or all of you know, many of the issues that are that are so important to multiple generations today and by all means, you know, you can talk about that.
Talk about, you know, What happened? You know, maybe would you have done something differently? Um, you know, how do you think this is going to impact your life, career going forward, right? It's, it's fine to own that and, and step into that. It's not something that necessarily we want to be ashamed of. So I think, we can frame trouble, we can frame an arrest, we can frame trouble with authority in very different ways.
And a lot of it depends on why that was done, what your role in it was, why you took that risk, and what you've done since to build on that or redeem yourself or whatever that looks like. So the tricky part is I have had students who kind of towards the end of their junior year or beginning of senior year get in trouble.
Serious trouble. Right. And if this happens freshman year, sophomore year, you have time to do therapy, to atone, to, you know, learn your lessons. It's very hard when you've, let's say, if you get suspended or dismissed first semester of senior year, to then turn an application in in November or January and say, well, learn my lesson.
It's all good. Because admissions officers are going to be very wary of that. So in those cases, sometimes it makes sense to take a gap year to really kind of step back and allow time to pass. Allow yourself to build a credible track record.
Allow, for example, the teacher, if you got caught cheating in a class, um, the teacher to say, “You know what? I was really disappointed in Thomas, um, when he did this, and he's really spent the year working hard. He's done this, he's done this, he's done this. He's really regained my trust. I really think he's an exceptional student, and while I had to give him a C because that's the way our grading policy works, he has tremendous potential. He's learned his lesson. He's going to spend this summer after senior year doing this, this, and this. And then, you know, taking a gap year and really digging in, and I think this young person has tremendous potential, and I urge you to give them serious consideration.”
That is a very, very powerful recommendation versus this just happened. The teacher won't talk to me, but I really just want to scramble and get in wherever I can. So, the takeaway here is that mistakes happen. We all make mistakes. How we respond to those mistakes, how we react to those mistakes, how we learn from those mistakes and then articulate those in the common application is really what makes all the difference in terms of your possible success in learning.
Undergraduate and eventually graduate applications because unfortunately most times you will need to address this in your graduate applications as well. So build the solid foundation, do the hard work, don't shy away from it. It might be the central theme of your main essay. It might be a briefer essay in the additional information.
That's part of your overall strategy, but it does need to be a critical component of your story and who you are. Thank you. Please remember to follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
