College Parent Central Podcast Vicki Nelson and Lynn Abrahams

Preparing for and transitioning into the first year of college involves so many, many details, and it’s easy to get caught up in just getting through what needs to be done. Then the college experience can be taken over by the day-to-day details of classes, assignments, GPA, activities, friends, schedules, career planning and just surviving. While we all know it’s good advice to live in the moment, sometimes it can also help to take a breath, zoom out a bit, and look at the bigger picture. In ...

Vicki and Elizabeth had a wide-ranging conversation with Harlan Cohen, college transition expert and author of The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into In College. Harlan shared why the transition to college can be so difficult and why finding your People, your Places, and having Patience can make a difference. Harlan encourages parents – and students – to understand that the first year of college, or at least the first semester, may be a terrible mess. Although that may no...

Talking about tutoring is a new topic for our podcast, but we are finding that college parenting begins earlier and earlier, and parents are making many early decisions with future college potential in mind. In this episode, Vicki was pleased to be able to have a conversation with Celine Bewsher, Owner/Manager of Club Z! Tutoring in Cambridge, MA. Celine shared her insights about how tutoring can help students succeed, not just by helping with a specific subject at a specific time, but by hel...

This episode is sort-of an encore episode. Each year we do an episode where we share some of our favorite – and helpful – books for college parents. This year, we realized that many of the books that we’ve talked about over the past four years are still ones we recommend. So we’ve pulled together seven of our suggestions from past years and put them together in this episode. These books are truly some of our top recommendations. Happy listening – and then happy reading! Thank you for listenin...

Once your student makes their final college decision and puts down that important deposit, they enter a new leg of the college journey. Sure, you know there will be lots of preparation work ahead – summer decisions, shopping, good-byes, packing – but your student may be thinking they’ll really become a college student at Move-in Day in the fall. Your student may still be a high school student, but the college knows there’s work to be done now. In this episode, Sarah and Vicki talk about your ...

When our student heads off to college, we worry about a lot of things, and one of the primary concerns is our student’s health and well-being. We first interviewed Dr. Jill Grimes, often dubbed the “College Doc” because of her focus on the health of college aged students, back in Episode #024 in 2020, at the height of the Covid Pandemic. It was time to invite her back to hear what’s changed in the last 4 years and also to hear about what’s new in the 3rd edition of her book The Ultimate Colle...