What Makes a Happy and Productive College Student

- I learned these on a parents weekend

Gisela Jia

(written on 10/23/2022) 

I'm still in Maine, sitting in the cafe (across from Kennebec river) of an inn in Bath near my daughter's college. When the pandemic hit in the Spring of 2020, she was a high school senior. Now as we're coming out the pandemic, she's already a college junior. 

This parents weekend is my first sort of full experience in the college. Freshman year, no parent weekend. Sophomore year, limited activities for parents. 

I did a variety of things. I went to a student research symposium,  a morning bird walk, a student award ceremony, a faculty member biology presentation, a soccer game, a rugby game, a hotpot dinner at a student dorm, a hibachi dinner with some students and parents, and there is more to this list.

     

With this bit of context introduced, I want to directly answer the question posed in the title of this post. The answer is:

- having a few stable and real friends, even just one or two

If you're busy plus have known this all along, no need to read more. Otherwise, here is my anecdotal evidence supporting this point.

Plants need light. Humans need social connections. To some of us, or at certain stages of our lives, it's not so much that social connections is our goal of life, but a precondition to allow us to focus on the things we want to or need to do.

Right now, if I was stripped off my main social connections such as my spouse, child, friends and a few close colleagues, I would not be able to focus on my work. 

College students are all busy with their studies (supposedly & rightfully & dutifully). As a result, college seems NOT to be a fertile ground for practicing social skills. As a result, for socially immature students, college peers seem to be "unmerciful" when in fact, they're just busy with their work and have no time to tend to individuals they cannot easily connect to.

That is why, although I put all my might into helping a few children through middle to high school with their academics and college applications and they got into very descent colleges, to my despair, they withered in college. I was not in the position to influence their social skills development. No one else is in that position but the regular caretakers who live, eat and move around together with children, i.e., in most cases, their parents.

How does that influence look like? This weekend, I connected many observations of my college child's interactions with her college peers to her years when living with us.  Given that she's considered to be a happy and productive college student by many, it might be helpful for me to share a few insights I gained.

Enjoy dogs and music, or something else, genuinely

Last night, we walked 20 minutes from the dorm to the hibachi restaurant in town. I was right behind my daughter and her few friends. I heard they were busily chatting away about music, most of the details being elusive to me, other than the news that Taylor Swift has a new album. I also saw that each time they ran into a dog, they would squat own, pat the dog,  ask about the breed and age, make a few remarks, before getting up and continuing their way.

I saw that the affection for dogs (and animals) and the enjoyment of music are part of these children, organically. So, when they're together, they find each other being interested in the same things, thus being with each other is fun. That's what we mean by chemistry. Relationships with chemistry tend to be more stable and long-lasting.

By human nature, young children like music and animals. However, not all children stay tuned to their inner calls of nature often because their mind becomes crowded with too many things.

    

My memories about my child and music - She learned and practiced violin from 5th to 9th grade, and nothing serious came about. But she has enjoyed music all her life - singing, following singers, going to concerts with friends throughout high school and college years. When she was in high school, one night she couldn't find a friend to go to a concert with her, I filled in! 

My memories about my child and dogs - She has been petting dogs since age 3, literally everywhere. We just made sure that she was not rushed to her next destination, and we created opportunities nearby and far. Each time we arrived at a city in China, her judgement of the experience in the city depended on my answer to her question "Are there dogs?" That led to dog shelter visits in Beijing, Chengdu, Guiyang, in addition to the countless times of dog petting on the streets, and the many preventive and emergency rabies shots due to dog and cat scratches. (I believe I was once the rabies shot and prevention "expert" for China travels.) From the 5th to 10th grade, every Sunday, rain or shine, with heavy homework or not, my daughter volunteered in Humane Society to clean cat litters on the 2nd floor, hoping to be promoted to the 3rd floor to take care of dogs (that promised promotion never materialized by the way). 

None of these can go on a college application to boost her profile, but I now can see this was true college prep work. In college, you can always find a few peers who truly enjoy dogs and music, and then, it's just a matter of bumping onto them to click. Note that such interests cannot be faked or quickly made, because college age kids may be the quickest to detect it and have least tolerance for that.  

For other college students, it may not be dogs and music. It can be other things that seem to be trivial but in fact significant in helping them connect to their peers. The list can be long. Just quickly, sports is one. Birding can be another. The student who led our birding walk said her biggest dream is to have a chickadee landing on her hand and to have seen all the seven species of chickadees existing in north America. Along with her on the trip was another student who would do the bird calls to go along with her descriptions of the birds. I'm sure birding to them is like dogs and music for my child.

Admire others, genuinely 

In only two days, I've been bombarded by the brilliance of college students. 

On the soccer field, players were darting here or there like bullets. I had to wonder whether they belong to the same species as my child. 

In the open air on the college central squad, I saw how the many student research presenters, standing in front of their posters, explained their research to visitors. There was no difference between them and the professional research presenters I mingled with for >25 years. The clarity. The thoughtfulness. The confidence. The enjoyment. I was blown away. 

At the award ceremony, I heard the soprano, high up on the stage, leading everyone to sing the college song. At the fall fest, I heard the singers, in the backyard of a campus house, singing pop songs. Their singing was so beautiful that it triggered, in my mind, the appearance of the Chinese four character idiom 天籟之聲 tiān lài zhī shēng, literally, sounds from the heaven. 

At the award ceremony, many dozens of students walked up to the stage to receive something called a Book Award. A book was awarded to each of them for having achieved a GPA of 4.0 the last school year. My daughter was NOT one of them but we went to cheer for those who got 4.0 and listen to her friend speaking as a student representative. 

In all the pre-college years, cheering others' achievements with my child was a main thread of her social life. We went to sport games, theatrical plays,  presentations, award ceremonies to witness and celebrate her peers achievements. Before, during and after such moments, we talked about what we saw and thought with excitement, just like we did for her achievements and would do if she had a sibling or two. 

All these things, we didn't not have a grand agenda such as cultivating character, making her prepared for college and life. We did what we thought would be fun and fair for her, for us and for her peers.

But now in hindsight, I can see that if she didn't have a natural admiration for others' success, she could be quite lost in college because she would be either fantasizing herself being the ones she was not, or regretting about the past. In contrast, she spends some of her time, enjoying the talents around her, and the rest of her time having her head buried in her own things. 

Never too much of a pre-college language and culture education

On Friday night, I joined a hot pot dinner at a peer's dorm. Sitting at the table with about a dozen mostly Asian and Chinese heritage students, we enjoyed fresh Malaysian style fish cakes one student's parents brought over from Brooklyn. There was chattering in Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay and English. 

Seeing my child swiftly switching between English and Mandarin, easily recognizing all the food ingredients, comfortably throwing in and scooping the cooked stuff out of the hot pot, my main thought was "Oh, I can see what the dozen years of pre-college Chinese learning has turned into. Well done!" My daughter was not alone, as I observed that her peers at the table, including a couple of non-Chinese, showed the same culturally fluent manner.

Skills in another language and culture glue college students together. How cool!

Ending thoughts for today -

Possessing the glue to group with others is important. Gluing to caring, fair and empathetic people brings one more satisfaction and return. To make that happen, one himself/herself needs to be a caring, fair and empathetic person. This comes from interacting with nature, animals, humans, and truly working through problems, one by one. 

In the CCBG community, year after year, I've witnessed amazing strengths, resilience, and thoughtfulness among our parents, along their children's pre-college journey. As I'm the oldest parent with the oldest child and have been presented with parenting questions often, I hereby share with you my few thoughts today. Hope a few words are useful to a few of you.

*Epilogue written on 4/9/2023: As an example that parenting is a journey along which something new always comes up, it dawned on me recently that the 4.0 college GPA achievement should not be admired. I think without its bondage, more college students will try uncertain courses, give up some study time for the common good (when these two conflict), and maintain the courage not to please their professors all the time and even challenge them from time to time. So, when my child came home for Spring break two weeks ago, I said to her "This year on parents' weekend, I will NOT go to the 4.0 GPA ceremony. "