Advice for First Year University: What Parents and New Students Actually Need to Know
Last August, I stood in my daughter Lila’s 12×16 foot dorm room, surrounded by half-unpacked storage bins and a Target comforter that refused to fluff up right. The air smelled like cheap microwave popcorn and the lemon cleaning spray the resident assistant made us use on the desk. The car was empty, the welcome week orientation speech was over, and Lila was picking at a loose screw on her $20 dorm desk chair, not looking at me. After three months of me quizzing her on laundry sorting and printing out 17 different packing checklists, she finally said what I hadn’t expected: “I know all the stuff I’m supposed to have. But what do I do when… when the hard stuff isn’t in any of the lists?” I froze. I’d planned for every possible tangible emergency, but I had nothing to say to that.
I drove home that day, stared at the empty space in the garage where her mountain bike used to be, and panicked. For two weeks, I refreshed location sharing every hour, waited by the phone for bad news. When it came, it was exactly that bad news: a 2 a.m. text saying she wanted to come home, she didn’t belong there. I called my old college roommate Sarah, who’s now an academic advisor at a public university 20 minutes from my house, and asked her what I did wrong.
Sarah said most of us spend all the time before college focusing on the stuff you can put in a duffel bag. The real questions kids don’t know to ask, and parents don’t know to answer, are the messy, invisible ones. What came out of that conversation was a set of small, concrete things I never would have thought of on my own, and they’ve worked far better than any of the viral checklists I obsessed over that summer.
The first rule I started following was to stop jumping to fix problems the second Lila calls upset. Sarah gave me a three-question prompt I keep written on a sticky note by my phone now. When Lila calls or texts with something that’s gone wrong, I first ask: “Do you want me to help you fix this, or do you just want me to listen?” The second question is: “What’s one small thing you can do about this today?” Third: “Can I remind you of how you handled that hard soccer tryout/AP bio final/fight with your best friend back in 10th grade?” I tried this the first time Lila called, upset that her entire group project group bailed on her a week before the deadline. Old me would have immediately told her to email the professor, demand to be put in a new group, outlined three steps for her to follow. New me asked the first question, and she said she just needed to yell about how rude they were for 10 minutes. By the time she was done yelling, she’d already figured out she could ask the professor for an extension on her individual portion, and that was that. It didn’t fix the whole problem, but it let her be the one to fix it, which is what she actually needed.
The second concrete tip is to pre-warn them about add/drop season, and give them explicit permission to quit a class that’s not working before it ruins their semester. I spent all of Lila’s senior year pushing her to stick with pre-med, because that’s what she’d wanted since she was 16. When she got her first chem test back with a D, I told her to just study more, go to office hours, stick it out. Sarah told me to do the opposite: before they even move in, pull up the university’s add/drop calendar, save it in their phone, and tell them straight: if you hate going to this class more than you hate the idea of changing your plan, drop it. You don’t have to explain it to me, you don’t have to have your whole future figured out right now. Dropping a class is cheaper and less stressful than failing it and having to retake it later. Lila dropped that intro chem class three days before the deadline. She switched to an intro environmental science class that same week, and now she’s declared the major. She still says that was the best decision she made first semester.
The third thing I changed was being specific about money, no lectures attached. I used to tell Lila “just call me if you need anything” when it came to money, but what that actually meant to her was “don’t ask me for money unless it’s a life or death emergency, because I’ll yell at you for being careless.” When her bike got stolen the third week of school, she went three days without telling me, because she thought I’d lecture her about not locking it properly. I changed that after that: I sat down with her and made a written list of what’s covered (tuition, housing, groceries, textbooks, bike repairs, any unexpected medical co-pay) and what she pays for with her campus coffee shop paycheck (concerts, takeout, new hoodies, fancy iced coffee). Then I told her: if you need any money for anything on that covered list, just text me. I’ll send it to you before we talk about any details. We can have the conversation about what happened later, no yelling first. That took all the shame out of asking for help.
It’s been eight months now, and Lila still calls me crying on Sunday nights sometimes when she misses our old dog. I still catch myself jumping in to fix things when she’s upset—last week I tried to tell her how to handle a rude shift manager, and she stopped me and said “mom, I just want you to listen.” I apologized, and sat quiet while she ranted. It’s not a perfect system, and I still don’t have all the answers. But that’s the thing I didn’t understand before Lila left: the best advice for university isn’t about how to pack the perfect dorm or get straight A’s. It’s about giving them the space to figure it out themselves, and giving yourself permission to not have all the answers. That’s enough, most days.
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