Long Island college freshmen find ways to adjust

BY DAVE MARCUS | dave.marcus@newsday.com

January 20, 2008

Isabel Pinto, age 18, a St. John's University student, lives at home and commutes to school. (Newsday / Alan Raia)

A few weeks into her first semester of college, Carly Lynch began to falter.

She missed her friends 300 miles away on Long Island, struggled in calculus class and was no longer a campus leader, as she had been at Lynbrook High School. Valedictorian of Lynbrook's class of 2007, she found herself surrounded by scores of valedictorians at Middlebury College in Vermont.

"Carly was good about not complaining," said her mother, Ginny, "but I could hear it in her voice."

The uncertainty Carly Lynch experienced is typical of the first year of college. Studies by psychologists and college administrators show that many students are wracked by homesickness, confusion and depression after the initial excitement of college wears off.

That has consequences: Nationally, 16 percent of students at four-year colleges drop out or transfer before sophomore year, according to ACT Inc., the nonprofit group that oversees many standardized tests. (For SUNY's four-year universities, including Stony Brook, the rate is 12 percent.) One in every 11 college students seeks counseling or psychological help within the first year, according to the National Survey of Counseling Center Directors.

"Conventional wisdom wrongly says if you're bright enough and you study enough, you'll succeed," said M. Lee Upcraft, a senior scientist at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State University.

The higher the income and education level of a family, the better a student tends to do, said Upcraft, who is also author of "Challenging and Supporting the First-Year Student" (Jossey-Bass). Women have a better graduation rate than men. The most accurate predictor of all, however though, is first-semester grades.

Carly's response to her angst was a textbook example of the way to turn things around. She poured her energy into a freshman writing seminar. She also joined a Swahili club and signed up for a calculus tutor, and by November, she was calling home blissfully to report that she'd been sledding with friends at 2:30 a.m.

"We see this all the time -- the big fish in a small pond has to adjust to swimming in a large pond," said Laurie Mitchell, the guidance chair at Lynbrook High, where Carly Lynch ranked first of 241 students.

Long Island guidance counselors say students who leave home grapple with four challenges: loneliness, conflict with roommates, peer pressure to drink and course loads that can seem overwhelming.

As her first semester at Marymount Manhattan College wound down last month, Liana Rowe, a 2007 graduate of Northport High School, kept noticing new empty spots where classmates once had sat.

Within a year of starting Marymount Manhattan, 33 percent of students drop out, take a leave or transfer, the college reports. Administrators blame the attrition on everything from families' tight budgets (Marymount Manhattan costs $33,000 a year) to an intensive program that scares off some of its theater students who aren't prepared to put in 12-hour days.

Liana Rowe says the very intensity that drove away some of her classmates is what makes her love the school. "I'm working harder than ever, but I'm doing what I've wanted to do since second grade," she said.

Many Long Island students attending selective colleges say they have been surprised by the number of hours they had to dedicate to reading and writing assingments as well as lab reports. As a senior at Oyster Bay High School, Dan Bianculli was admitted to all the colleges where he applied, including Cornell and Vanderbilt universities. He chose Rice University, in Houston.

Even after taking the toughest honors and Advanced Placement courses in Oyster Bay, "every class I've had here is considerably harder than any high school class I ever took," Bianculli said.

Bianculli's mother, Angela, worried about her son going to Texas because he had never lived away from home. But she has been pleased with his transition and attributes his happiness to the way Rice organizes its dormitories. Students live in cohesive residential colleges, which have barbecues and other special events hosted by a professor who lives in or next to the dorm. Dan, she said, had "an instant family." At Christmas, he came home wearing a cowboy hat.

Long Island students have found all sorts of ways of making the transition. At Rice, Bianculli used time management skills he learned in middle school: He did his chemistry homework two or three days before it was due every week to avoid last-minute snafus. At Yale University, Trinh Nguyen sought help from upper-class tutors in a calculus course -- a twist from her days at Walter G. O'Connell High School in Copiague, where she was the one volunteering to help others.

Lauren Mobyed, who graduated last summer from Mineola High, has a natural defense against homesickness: her twin sister, Kristen. The two were recruited to play lacrosse at George Washington University in Washington.

Lauren, who wants to study international law, lives one floor above Kristen, who wants to be an environmental engineer. After high school years -- in which every minute seemed to be devoted to a sport or club -- the sisters are surprised by their big swaths of unscheduled time every day, and how busy they still are. Classes. Homework. Daily lacrosse practice.

"I used to say in high school that I had absolutely no time," Lauren remembered. "You find out in college you really do not have any time."

Julie Gross, an independent college counselor in Port Washington, says that once they are on their own at college, students usually learn time management out of necessity.

"So many Long Island kids grow up with a full schedule of activities that it's almost like a fresh start when they have to choose what they can realistically do at college," she said. "They need to make very adult decisions."

In Vermont, Lynch's first challenge was to "get used to living with people all the time," she said. "The work was overwhelming at first. Plus I was coming from three months of not really doing anything in the summer. At first it was weird being away from home."

For the first time, too, she was spending months far from her twin brother, Jason. He was starting his freshman year at Stonehill College in Massachusetts.

Carly's initial struggles sound familiar to Middlebury's associate dean Karen Guttentag, who directs the first-year orientation program, which starts with overnight hiking trips for new students. "We realize that for some students adjusting is quite easy and smooth, while for others it's pretty traumatic finding themselves with peers who are just as exciting and talented and smart as they are."

For some students, college comes naturally. Isabel Pinto found the first semester of law studies at St. John's University easier than her course load at Mineola High School last year. So for her second semester, she's taking advanced classes, and more of them.

U.S. Department of Education studies show that white females have the highest completion rate of college (59 percent) while Hispanic males have the lowest (47 percent). In addition, Upcraft said, students who are the first in their family to go to college are among the most likely to drop out.

By those measures, Matthew Rojano is triumphing against the odds. The son of Mexican farmers who never got beyond the eighth grade, Rojano graduated from Bridgehampton High School and is halfway through his first year at Suffolk Community College's Riverhead campus, where he's studying accounting. He also works long hours at a restaurant.

"College is really like a bigger high school," said Rojano. He initially planned to earn a bachelor's degree at a four-year SUNY campus. Recently he has considered earning his associate's degree and starting an company to manage accounts for small businesses on the East End.

When he gives advice to his younger brother and sister, though, Rojano urges them to complete four years of college. "I tell them college opens your eyes," he said, "and opens your future."