College Admissions Employees Tell Ridiculous Parent Stories
One of the best things of AskReddit, is you can hear stories directly from people with real life experience in situations that you might not normally hear from. Of course, there are also trolls. But the real stories are great.
I was recently on AskReddit when I found this question:
Here are a few of the top answers to this question:
From user vlatria:
I worked orientation a few summers and ran the IT portion of the several day program. We had a station where kids could come in and set up their username for their University email. In big bold letters on the registration screen it says something like, 'this username can never be changed, we recommend using something professional like firstname.lastname'
I had a kid come over to me and sadly ask if there were any exceptions to the rule of it being unchangeable and he explained his mom set it up without him knowing and it was a term of endearment like pookie bear or something (I forgot exactly what it was). We couldn't change it.
From user xaviira:
My first day of undergrad, I went into the bookstore to get my textbooks and there was a middle-aged woman leading her miserable-looking son around the bookstore, piling his textbooks in his arms. She had his class list printed out, and from the way she was speaking to him, it was pretty clear that Mama had picked out all of his classes for him. When I met up with a friend in the food court later, we saw her sitting with him at a table, textbooks spread out, and she was actually highlighting the chapters and paragraphs that she felt were the most important, and writing out a study schedule for him, while he stared blankly off into the distance. Poor kid.
The helicopter parenting at that university (large public research university in Canada) was so bad that my school actually held a "parents' orientation" during the student orientation that basically consisted of staff telling parents "leave your fucking kids alone, do not email their professors, we will not show you their grades, we will not check to make sure they're eating their vegetables".
My first day of graduate school, my advisor told me "if your parents ever contact me, I will block them immediately".
From user Tall_Mickey:
I'm in the registrar's office. The student does all business and enrollment through a portal. Some parents demand the password, get it, and do all the work: pick classes and enroll the student, make advisor appointments, all that.
Among other things, uni teaches you how to handle yourself in a bureaucracy. These students don't even learn that. They're still their parents' child.