I'm sorry to sound kind of bleak here, but I tend to think that it is wiser to be pragmatic.
College is not (any longer) necessarily going to be "all that" for a truly gifted student.
Many of their peers are going to be hot-housed kids (or Tigerkids, or something along those lines), and relatively few of them are there for anything but the-- um--
WINNING.So with that in mind, make sure that your kids have a good-- GOOD-- set of coping skills, excellent impulse control, and self-efficacy in place. Make sure that they have time-management and stress-management skills like an air-traffic controller.
Make sure that they don't expect post-secondary to be "all about LEARNING!!" because it isn't necessarily so.
It's about acing exams, checking the right boxes, getting the right people to notice you at the right time, getting signatures, completing the right number of meaningless tasks (right, wrong, or otherwise), and racking up the proper credentials along the way to a (presumably) golden ticket.
DD has been horrified by how many of her classmates (even honors students) simply do. not. care. if they retain ANYTHING after a final exam in a course. It makes her sad-- and lonely.
I don't know if this is the particular institution that she's at (though it has a very good reputation as a public research institution) or what, but this has been mind-boggling to me. It's the young adult version of Val's spelling bee description.
