College-Bound

Last night was a slightly surreal experience for me, but it was a lot of fun at the same time! At 5:30, I got on a bus with 65 college-bound CRJ students, and we drove across the city of Houston from quaint little CRJ to big prestigious Strake Jesuit.

Strake, as I think I've mentioned before, is the St. Joe's Prep, Chaminade, or Hendricken of Houston: an elite all-boys Prep school in Houston. It shares a campus with St. Agnes Academy, the Dominican Sisters all-girls school where Sister Mary works. Strake hosted a college fair last night, open to students of Catholic schools in the Houston-Galveston Diocese.

There were a HUGE number of schools represented- over 200! Our students were a little overwhelmed at first- a lot of people, a gorgeous campus of a high school, and colleges all over the country. They knew they couldn't talk to every college, and had a few ideas of which schools they wanted to talk to, but we were there for a long time. Many students kept coming up to me to ask for more recommendations about where to look: "I want a small school, not in Texas, and I want to study Psychology." "I want a huge school, outside of Texas, and I want to be a lawyer." etc...

I sent my fair share over to check out PC of course, but many of my students had already met with Fr. Iri during his visit to Cristo Rey earlier in the day. It was fun to try to match students up with different colleges they might like, and even more fun to see them come back with excited smiles on their faces. For many of them, last night was probably the first time the conversation about them going to college actually became a reality, and I so enjoyed watching that happen.

My job was mostly to walk around the fair and be there for students who looked a little lost. They were easy to pick out in their CRJ uniforms :). I got to do a lot of people watching in the mean time- I noticed which college representatives were engaging and excited, as well as those who were not. As I mentioned before, this fair was for any Catholic school student in the area, and so while my main focus was on my own students, I couldn't help but notice their competition.

The other students were a lot like me- the girls, while wearing a St. Agnes uniform, looked like they could have gone to Notre Dame. They had noses turned up at schools like Sam Houston State and University of Houston, but were eagerly in line for Notre Dame, Georgetown, St. Louis University, Penn, Elon, Emory.... you name a tier one or two school, and its table was swarming with girls from St. Agnes, Incarnate Word Academy, or boys from Strake. My students were a little overwhelmed by them at first, especially when they were trying to talk to the same schools, but I saw them all gain confidence over the course of the evening.

One of many advantages that the other students had over mine was the fact that usually, they were not alone. They had helicopter parents engaging the representatives in conversations, pushing them toward certain tables, and knowing lots of good questions to ask. Most of our students' parents were not in attendance, so the other teachers and I took on the helicopter parent role when we could. We spoke with reps, stood in line with our students,  and pushed them towards tables of schools that they might not think they can get into, even though we know we can.

So why was last night surreal? It was the first time other than Kairos that I was able to see my students experience something that I also went through in high school, and how differently they had to experience it. I was so extremely proud of them, and had a lot of fun in the process, but it was definitely another step toward solidarity with my students: I'm beginning to understand how differently their lives are than mine.