Preparing for Success in College and Beyond: A Pediatrician's Guide for Teens and Parents

By Louis Hempel, MD

This book is written to help high school students prepare for becoming successful college applicants. It is also written to help high school seniors and entering college students prepare for ongoing success once they arrive on campus. The book is written by Dr. Louis Hempel, who has practiced general pediatrics in Metro Atlanta for over 30 years. During his long career, he has interacted with thousands of high school and college students whose families come from all over the world.

The foundation of success for both high school and college students is based on teaching them to learn strong communication skills, and to take care of their mental and physical health. Students with ineffective communication skills; poorly managed mental health disorders such as ADHD, anxiety, or depression; alcohol or substance abuse problems; or poor dietary, exercise, and sleep habits will have huge barriers to future success. Once a strong foundation has been established by addressing those potential barriers, the book will delve into suggestions for extracurricular involvement outside of the classroom. There is one chapter dedicated to those students who would like to consider becoming college athletes. It is the combination of academic achievement and involvement in extracurricular activities that will help create a high school resume that will provide meaningful content to be used on college and university applications and essays. With the help of this guidebook, the author hopes that those applications and essays will have a better chance to stand out amongst those submitted by thousands of other students.

There are several chapters for high school juniors and seniors in the later part of the book. Those chapters will help students learn to research which colleges and universities they should target for consideration, based on their academic abilities and career ambitions. There will be suggestions on how to plan campus visits, how to look realistically at the economic realities of various career paths, and suggestions on how to approach financial planning for college. For those students who are entering college there is a chapter devoted to establishing a disciplined approach to academic study, which includes avoiding many common pitfalls.

The final chapter is devoted to the author telling about his journey through college to his admission into medical school. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate to students that their path to success will often require navigating around many obstacles along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350920147

Book preview

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Preparing for Success in College and Beyond:

A Pediatrician’s Guide for Teens and Parents

© 2023, Louis Hempel, MD

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Edition

Print ISBN: 979-8-35092-013-0

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35092-014-7

About the Author

Dr. Louis Hempel is a partner and past president of Children’s Medical Group, which he joined in 1990. Children’s Medical Group is one of the largest private pediatric practices in the southeastern United States, currently operating three office locations in Metro Atlanta. For more than fifteen years, Dr. Hempel has also served as a preceptor for numerous physician assistant, nurse practitioner, and medical students in his office. He is an associate clinical professor of the Medical College of Georgia / University of Georgia Medical Partnership, and a two-time recipient of their Excellence in Teaching award.

Dr. Hempel is originally from Georgetown, Kentucky. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Kentucky, received his medical degree from the University of Louisville, and completed his pediatric residency training at Wake Forest University. Dr. Hempel’s wife, Sarah, is a career hospital pharmacist. For more than twenty years, Dr. and Mrs. Hempel have resided in the Brookhaven neighborhood of Atlanta.

Dr. and Mrs. Hempel have a son, Sam, and a daughter, Hannah. Sam and Hannah are both graduates of The Lovett School in Atlanta. After completing undergraduate studies in economics and statistics, Sam earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Georgia, and a doctorate in finance from Cornell University. Sam and his wife now reside in Washington, DC. Hannah completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia in exercise science and went on to earn her medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia. She then completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Cincinnati. Hannah and her husband now reside in Atlanta.

While their children were attending college, Dr. and Mrs. Hempel served on the University of Georgia Parents Leadership Council. Over their six years of service to this organization, Dr. and Mrs. Hempel had the opportunity to meet University President Jere Morehead, the Dean of Students, the Provost, and many other high-level administrators and faculty. These interactions helped provide insights for writing this book.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all of my current and former patients, who have inspired me to write and publish this guide to becoming a successful college student. Your accomplishments during your high school and college years are truly amazing. Thanks so much for sharing your stories and blessing me to include them here.

Contents

About the Author

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One: How to Build a High School Resume for Successful College Admission

Chapter Two: Put Down Your Phone and Learn How to Talk

Chapter Three: Don’t Let ADHD, Anxiety, or Depression Spoil Your College Dreams

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Anxiety and Depression

Chapter Four: Prevention and Treatment of Alcohol, Marijuana, and Nicotine Abuse

Chapter Five: From Maple Street Guitar Lessons to Playing Jazz in Italy

Chapter Six: Showcasing the Endless Possibilities of Life Beyond the Classroom

Chapter Seven: What to Know about Playing Sports in College

Chapter Eight: Hosting Foreign Exchange Students

Chapter Nine: Make High School Summers Productive

Chapter Ten: College and University Campus Visits

Chapter Eleven: Teaching Financial Literacy and the Economics of College and Career Choice

Chapter Twelve: Avoid the Pitfalls of the College Freshman Year

Chapter Thirteen: My Journey through College to Acceptance in Medical School

Epilogue

Notes

Introduction

First of all, this book is not about the technical aspects of filling out college applications or writing essays for college applications. Primarily, this book is about inspiring teenagers to use their high school years wisely to create dynamic and interesting life experiences to put on those applications. Content that will help make those applications and essays pop in the eyes of the admissions committees. Hopefully, you and your teens will be inspired by stories about what successful high school students are doing both academically and outside the classroom. How students from Lambert High School here in Metro Atlanta won first prize in an international science competition by creating a new biomarker for detecting cardiovascular disease. How one brother manufactured working artificial hands, and how the other created a portable learning station for senior citizens in assisted living homes as their Eagle Scout projects. There is a whole chapter for those who would like to consider becoming college athletes. In that chapter you will read about how a skinny teenager from Cincinnati dedicated himself to qualifying for the U.S. Open Golf Tournament, and made the field as a 17-year-old amateur paired with PGA golfer Ricky Fowler.

The book will open with chapters about how to lay the groundwork for high school and college success. It will introduce the concept of creating a high school resume. Next, there will be a chapter on the importance of learning good communication skills, followed by chapters that will help high school students learn to cope with stressors associated with their mental and physical health. The middle chapters of the book will offer numerous suggestions about extra-curricular activities that are available for high school students. The later chapters are dedicated to the process of researching and visiting college and university campuses, researching potential career choices, financial planning for college, and then preparing to launch a successful freshman year.

During the years that I spent on the University of Georgia Parents Leadership Council, I gained valuable insights as to how admissions committees across the country build their student bodies. While participating in our weekend meetings each semester, we parent volunteers had the opportunity to tour various campus facilities, and attend lectures that explained how the student body is organized. For all colleges and universities, it is about much more than filling their classes with straight-A students who have above-average SAT or ACT scores. They are looking for ballet dancers, cheerleaders, equestrians, quarterbacks, poets, robotics team members, swimmers, and students with many other unique talents. In other words, they want to put together a student body that has a diverse set of interests and skills that spill outside the classroom.

Over the past thirty years, I have been practicing general pediatrics at Children’s Medical Group in Metro Atlanta. I have had the privilege of watching several hundred of my patients grow into young adulthood, as well as watching my own two children and their friends do the same. What inspired me to write a book about coaching adolescents to become successful college applicants and college students is the observation that there are vast differences in how middle school students from similar families are prepared for this task as they grow up and graduate from high school.

Over the past 30 years, I have made a point to interview high school and college students in a variety of settings to try and have a better understanding of why there are such differences in preparedness for college. For those students who are high school juniors and seniors and have expressed an interest in going to college, I like to ask a few simple questions. These include things like, So, what have you been doing to get ready for college? Have you thought about which colleges you might want to consider attending? Have you had a chance to visit any of them yet? The variation in responses is astounding. On one extreme is the student who has obviously put little thought or preparation into the whole process. On the other end of the spectrum is the very polished student who has taken their academic work seriously and involved themselves in meaningful extracurricular activities. As their junior year of high school approached, they put many hours into researching colleges and universities to see which ones they should target for potential campus visits and applications.

The book intertwines practical advice on a variety of college-related subjects with short stories about my patients and my own life experiences. I hope these short stories will make it more interesting to read and help illustrate the principles that are being discussed. As we enter an age where artificial intelligence, or AI, is generating so much content for the books that we buy, I also hope that it will be refreshing to read something that is authentic and original. Please share the book with your teen children to reinforce the sound advice that you are already giving them.

In my work at the Johns Creek location of Children’s Medical Group, we have a large percentage of patients who are high school and college students. Our patient families are typically headed by college-educated parents. Our adolescent patients typically attend highly competitive, large public high schools or one of multiple well-respected private schools in the area. Our young adult college and university students return from all over the country for office visits when they are home on summer or holiday breaks. They share their stories of success and failure, and they give us very useful insights about present-day college life.

We are blessed to have a very diverse patient population, with almost 50 percent being recent immigrants from India, China, Korea, South America, Europe, and many other places around the world. I have found that students from these families tend to be extremely competitive college applicants, and I will try to articulate some of the things that make these students so successful in the book. Of course, our multi-generation American students are also amazing, and there is no shortage of stories about their accolades to share with you as well.

This book shares the collective wisdom that I gained from being both a pediatrician and a father. I believe it can be a valuable asset to help your adolescent child become not only a successful college applicant and college student but ultimately a strong member of the global workforce.

Chapter One:

How to Build a High School Resume

for Successful College Admission

For most adults, the concept of building a resume is something that begins after high school. For college students, that means having a strong academic record, finding internships or other real-world opportunities to gain experience within their desired field of interest, and preparing themselves to become graduate school or job applicants as they finish their undergraduate education. Beyond getting our first jobs out of college or graduate school, we are programmed to think about how to continue building on that resume during our work years so that we can be promoted into positions of higher authority and higher pay as our careers progress.

It is my opinion that we parents need in instill the concept in our children that they should build their resumes beginning in high school as they prepare to become future college applicants and college students. We also need to be aware that, from the standpoint of application to college, this resume will be mostly built during the freshman, sophomore, and junior years of high school. By the beginning of the senior year of high school, the college-application season has opened. To have the best chance of gaining acceptance into the most competitive colleges and universities, these applications will generally need to be submitted within the first few weeks of the senior year. Sometimes an application for binding early acceptance can show strong interest in a particular institution and help a student stand out against thousands of other applicants.

The most important point of this book is to have parents sit down with their high school students on a regular basis through those years to help them develop a resume that is purposeful and comprehensive. It needs to be more than just reminding them that they need to make good grades and find an extracurricular activity to become involved in. The competition to enter the most desirable, and often highest paying careers will begin with the competition to become accepted into a college or university that does a great job of preparing their students for those careers. The most successful adults usually have very well-rounded resumes. They are competent in their fields of expertise, not only because they are technically proficient but also because they take care of themselves emotionally and physically, and they are good communicators and well-rounded citizens. The building blocks of this process will be touched on in this chapter, and then expanded upon in the chapters that follow.

Of course, the foundation of any successful college application is the academic record achieved during the high school years. By the end of middle school, most students will have had the opportunity to show their academic potential, and this should be viewed realistically as the high school curriculum is planned out for each individual student. There will be many students who are simply not capable of filling up their semesters with numerous Advanced Placement (AP) and honors-level classes during high school. Most of us are aware of the parents who push their children in athletics, music, or other extracurricular activities to a point that is unhealthy, and we need to be mindful to not make the same mistakes when it comes to pushing our own children academically. There is a fine line between offering encouragement and emotional support for strong students who have the ability to handle a highly challenging academic load, and mentally breaking down those who simply do not have the innate ability to do AP-level work. A high school student of average intelligence who is supported by their parents according to their own abilities can be just as happy in their career as the biomedical engineer who graduates from MIT.

Determining the academic potential of any given high school student is more complicated than simply measuring IQ. There are many other factors that need to be considered and addressed. Emotional health and physical health play a huge role in academic success or relative failure. Unrecognized attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, or depression can devastate a high school academic record. Chapter Three includes an in-depth discussion about managing mental health problems. Physical health is often under-recognized as a contributing factor of a student’s high school academic achievement. During my career as a pediatrician, I have seen several students who were struggling to cope with school because they had undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea or simply because they were tired and sluggish all day related to obesity and lack of exercise, or because they were so underweight that they were borderline malnourished. Occasionally we will find students who are struggling in school because they have been suffering from undiagnosed thyroid disease, celiac disease, or other medical diseases that affect their ability to concentrate on their studies. The point here is to make sure that your high school students are seeing their primary care medical providers on a regular basis to address any mental or physical health problems as early as possible. I would especially encourage taking them for an annual wellness physical, as in my experience it is during these visits that many of these problems come to light for the first time.

Building a framework for academic achievement in high school involves many other components as well. As parents, we need to take advantage of parent-teacher conferences when they are offered. Students need to be encouraged to take advantage of teacher office or open-house hours that may be available to them at the end of the school day. They should ask questions about their studies during the whole semester, and not just in the days immediately before major tests. Sometimes there may be a need for tutoring in some subjects, either within the school system or privately. Our students need to think about establishing friend groups for their major courses who can serve as encouraging study partners. As high school progresses, be sure to take advantage of the guidance counselors who serve as advisors for each student as they prepare to look at colleges that are best targeted to their academic interests and achievements.

An important, but often controversial, component of the high school academic record is achievement on standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT. In recent years, these tests have been de-emphasized or even eliminated by some colleges and universities as a required part of the application process. There are some who feel that these tests may be culturally biased or have other innate flaws that can tarnish an otherwise capable student. I personally have mixed emotions about these tests. I am not trained as an expert in academics, so I will not try to argue against the points that have been made about the flaws in these tests. On the other hand, I do think that eliminating these tests as a requirement for college acceptance may simply end up delaying the competition for acceptance into graduate school or high-level career placement beyond college. I do not believe that most medical, law, or business schools are going to drop the requirements for their applicants to take the MCAT, LSAT, or GMAT standardized tests anytime soon. And while it is true that students who do relatively poorly on the SAT or ACT compared to other accepted students at their colleges or universities may do just fine in the long run, I do wonder if many of those students will find themselves in over their heads and struggle. It is possible that many of these students will find that they would have been better off attending schools that are more benchmarked for their standardized test score results.

Through my many years of experience as a pediatrician and interacting with hundreds of teenagers, I have become convinced that one of the greatest detriments to them living up to their full potential is the failure to develop strong face-to-face conversational skills. Some of this is likely attributed to spending excessive time communicating through texting and social media, at the expense of time spent talking to others in person. There are some children who are just shy or otherwise socially awkward who need the full support of their