world travel for college admissions -- Virtually Advising Q+A

The Q: My teenage daughter is debating whether or not to travel to India with me, and I suggested that it would be a "plus" in terms of college applications. She says it makes no difference. Could you please advise?

The A: I'd say it's a crap shoot. Yes, college admissions committees do often look at the activities and experiences a student's had outside of the classroom, and a trip to India in itself may make a student more intriguing. But if all your daughter gets out of this experience is the ability to type "spent time in India" on one line of her college applications, it may not be worth the time and money to bring her along.

What's key here is your daughter's interest. Does the idea of traveling abroad appeal to her? What would you guys do while you're there - are you likely to be holed up in a hotel, or are you more likely to mill around and experience the culture? More importantly, what is your daughter most likely to do? Would she be happy to come along, or would she rather just stay inside the hotel and enjoy whatever Western amenities she can latch on to?

A good friend of mine took a trip to Mexico with his friends during his junior year of high school. He did it simply because the opportunity was made available to him, but the experiences he had while he was there (interacting with locals, immersing himself in the language and the culture) proved to be so illuminating for him that he decided to write about it in his college application essay and bring it up during his interviews. Whether or not writing and speaking about his unique experience helped him get into the colleges he wanted, I honeslty don't know, but I do know it was a valuable enough experience in itself that it was worth doing - and that it may have helped open his mind to the vast number of possibilities that college, and life, provides.

The best advice I can give you is to take that same frame of mind into making this decision. Forget about the admissions committees and your daughter's college prospects; those committees are far too fickle for you to base life decisions on the directions in which they may or may not lean. Don't take your daughter to India just for the sake of taking her to India. She should go if you - and she - feel she can have a far cooler and more fulfilling time than she'd have if she stayed close to home instead.

—Myles Helfand, General Advisor