Spring 2010

First Person

CTY parent Katherine Cornwell talks about her daughter, Betsy, who took a chance, and how that decision is still paying off today.

 In 2001, when Betsy, then a seventh-grader, received her Talent Search score and saw that she was eligible for summer programs, she immediately picked a site that was about as far away as you could get from our home in New Hampshire: Hawaii.

Not a chance, I thought.

My husband Gray and I had sent her away to camp before. She hated it, which is why we decided that, if she went away again, she’d have to pick a site within driving distance of home. That stipulation, combined with her interest in writing, meant she’d spend three weeks at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The prospect of our middle-schooler being away for three weeks was difficult for the entire family. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time, and both Gray and I still had reservations about whether or not she could handle CTY.  Would we be rushing back to Pennsylvania just days into the experience?

As a parent, you just try to stay supportive and keep your own anxieties from affecting your kids. I crossed my fingers as the whole family—Betsy, Gray, my younger daughter Helen and I—loaded the Prius and drove south. We spent a day at Hershey Park then rolled onto Dickinson’s campus the next morning.  Because Gary and I attended boarding school when we were Betsy’s age, we knew that a long goodbye could just make things harder. So, we attended the welcome meeting for all the families, then quickly saw her off. It was hard, but it helped that the CTY residential assistants immediately swooped up Betsy and her new classmates and kept them occupied.

While she was away, several members of the family sent letters and small care packages. This worked well.  We limited calls to about one per week. By week two, she was really comfortable with the other students and her residential advisor and much more focused on all the fun she was having.

Her time at Dickinson was a great mix of academics and just plain fun. She swam, did yoga, danced and went out to movies on weekends. And it was especially good for her to be around other kids who were passionate about writing.

CTY was nothing short of a life-saver for Betsy. She’d felt so undervalued at one of the schools she used to attend, so the encouragement and camaraderie she experienced that summer were invaluable. It’s why she went back three years in a row, had the same roommate twice, and during her four summers with CTY never even thought of attending a different site—not even one with volcanoes.

Betsy’s summers in Pennsylvania gave her the confidence to study abroad. In 2005, she spent seven weeks in northern France. That might not have been possible if she hadn’t had practice adapting to a new environment and making new friends.

The middle-schooler we sent to Dickinson is now a senior English major at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she edits the literary magazine and writes for Teen Ink, a national teen magazine. She’s also busy on a novel set on the Isle of Shoals, a small archipelago straddling the Maine/New Hampshire border, and weighing her options for graduate programs in writing, including one that would take her to Scotland.

Although we missed her every time she went away, I’m glad Betsy got an early, structured glimpse of what life away from home could be like. It helped make her the writer and explorer she is today.

 —As told to Lionel Foster, Assistant Program Manager, Talent Search.

Would you like to share your family’s CTY experience? If so, email Lionel at lfoster@jhu.edu.