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Looks like we can put a big check mark next to, "Select a College and Get Admitted" on Marii's never-ending TO-DO list. Roger William University, Bristol, Rhode Island is the place she'll be, the deal sealed after a family jaunt down there last weekend for "Accepted Students Day".
I'm proud of our daughter, how she went about getting to that choice, all told. A very short year-and-a-half ago, I would have never believed it.
I've been driving Marii to school most mornings for the past two years; part of the deal we made early in junior year after too many missed school busses. Occasionally we talk, overcoming the parent filter permanently attached to every spare teenage ear. I've watched her ideas develop over time, from patently clueless in the fall of 2008, to a lot more focused and decisive now.
Well, I've had little or no experience with college admissions, since I've never attended a day of it. As a kid, the only folks I knew who were college graduates fell into three major categories: priests, teachers and medical professionals (though I never really thought of the priests as 'college guys'). Only one neighbor I can recall: an ad salesman for a local billboard company, and the dad of just one among dozens of friends, a small businessman running a mickey-mouse phone answering service... and badly, too. Not many role models; the folks around us toiled in the factories, shops, and the trades, solidly lower-middle class at everything they did, including a strict avoidance of a higher education.
Going away to college seemed like an unattainable dream to me then, since at the time there was no money to pay for it. Anyway, I didn't want to be no freakin' lawyer... or anything else, for that matter.
Another story, but I've had no real experience and Marii's Mom went to a top women's college in Japan but doesn't know the system here. She would have Marii in one of the Seven Sisters based on reputation, at least until she got a load of the tuition costs. We were the blind leading the blinder at first. Fortunately, Marii took up a lot of the initiative in driving the process and in the end, did it quite well.
Sometimes our children will suddenly and sneakily mature on us and we hardly notice.
As the old song says, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" |
Since Roger Williams never sat for a portrait and no surviving likeness remains, the artist who made the statue that centers the RWU campus used Red Sox slugger Ted Williams as the model.
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