Ezra Klein, a prominent columnist and podcaster, recently wrote a piece that dialed down to this message:

Ignore the polls.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

His audience of highly-engaged, well-educated, possibly-extremely online readers seemed to acknowledge a paradox: in the national presidential election, there is nothing any individual citizen can do besides cast a vote, but it’s nevertheless tempting to refresh the Times home page during a year that has seen disastrous flooding in the southeast, conflict in the Middle East, and so many plot twists SNL can barely keep up in its fiftieth season.

I was reminded of Klein’s advice when I opened a forum dedicated to applying to colleges. The tone of the posts went well beyond “looking for information” to what I can only describe as hysterical. One post simply stated, “I’m hyperfixated on the US college admission system and it’s ruining my life.”

Reflecting on the gap between “informed citizen/applicant” and “showing signs of mental breakdown,” Mindspire can share some observations based on our years of working with students and the science of learning and attention as you prepare to get the results of your October SAT scores:

Normalize emotions — but don’t overindulge anxiety

A strange feature of modern life is that at the same time as more people have become acquainted with therapy-speak, the mental health picture is worse on every measure than it was a generation ago, especially for young people.

Drawing on the works of Jonathan Haidt, one of the most believable hypotheses of the cause of this rise in a sense of impending doom is the two-way feedback of social media.

To take the example of presidential elections, anyone who was alive in the late 1990s and early 2000s could hardly call those years a tension-free political utopia. Plenty of the adults in my life had strong opinions about those in power, and talk radio had an underlying tone of the end of the world being at the door. (With the Y2K bug, this briefly became rather literal.) But a feature of those years is there was a natural limit on how much time and mental space national affairs could occupy your brain.

As Freddie deBoer memorably put it, the Internet back then was a place you went to, not the place we all live. (”It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive,” as he hyperbolically, but amusingly, put it.)

So how does this relate to the college application and test-taking process? Take a page from the late twentieth century and chill, dude. Any student who is working with a tutor and college counselor is already set up for more success than an average one — just like the poll-watcher obsessives probably aren’t spending long days in the mines.

If your student is worried about their score increase, it’s a great moment to share a Zen Buddhist truth — expending mental energy on something you can’t change blocks you from the ability to tackle what you can.

Look retrospectively and make a plan

A big difference between students who receive tutoring and those who go in cold is that the former group is normalizing making mistakes, and learning from them.

This might be the number one difference between a student who acknowledges there is pressure to achieve his or her goals, and one who starts to have a crack-up.

The SAT is a skills-based test — and it’s one we see students make huge gains on every cycle. But sometimes, students don’t improve as much as they’d like.

Rather than beating oneself up, it’s far more productive to examine the actual results, make a plan for next steps, and decide whether to retake the test in November, December, or beyond for juniors.

This difference between a focus on results and effort has been summarized with the concept of a Growth Mindset. I’ll be frank — when I first was given that book in my first tutoring role, I sort of rolled my eyes because it didn’t seem to be super actionable if you had normalized your internal narrative to “being perfect,” not the effort you put in.

But focusing on your effort doesn’t preclude a commitment to excellence. The more I learned about the science of mindset, in fields as diverse as entrepreneurship and elite athletics, the more I had to admit — carrying around a story that anything less than perfect, meant I might as well fail, led to more failures than a more realistic view of my absolute and relative strengths.

One of my graduate school classmates just let me know that after three rounds of interviews that began in July, he didn’t get a job offer from Google. Of course, that’s a shame, but it need not be a reason he is filled with shame. As he put it, “onward!”

Log off — after you’ve done the work

Just before an important (to me!) Advanced Placement exam, I was hanging out with a friend of mine who lived kitty-corner to our house. She was creative and energetic, but had never been particularly academic, and would freely have admitted as much.

I had worked myself into a tizzy, thinking I should be cramming the night before. She proposed, after hearing the amount and intensity of preparation I’d done all year, that we just watch Clue and maybe go grab some smoothies instead.

I remember this nearly breaking my brain, but I relented. We had a great time.

I got a score of 5 on all of my A.P. exams — that one included.

It’s this sort of personality that Ezra’s piece was speaking to, and I found it heartening to see more healthy ways of coping with any October Surprises that may come our way in the comments. There were people writing postcards, volunteering for phone banks, donating money, remembering to vote early if their state allowed it, talking to their college-aged students about registering.

No one was saying to swing too far to the other direction into apathy or indifference about a big event, but that’s the emotion I saw most prominently among the stressed-out teens in the online forum. They had worked themselves up by consuming too much information that they could be putting into doing some time on Mathchops or reviewing their last mock. They were having panic attacks about getting internships in college before they’d learned to drive. They didn’t seem to be having any fun, sadly.

So, we of course are hopeful that our current students see great gains in their scores — please reach out to us once you get those results, because that’s our job here!

But your child’s job is to learn how to learn, and it can always be good to reflect on what attitudes and mindsets we’re setting an example for them by our words and actions.