My daughter and son will be going to college next year. They are twins and have been very close since they were born. They share many of the same friends so they do a great deal of activities together. When it came to picking out which college they wanted to go to my husband and I tried not to influence their decision.

My son has always enjoyed surfing the internet for different information. He found a website that was filled with scholarship opportunities. He looked up information on which schools that he was interested in offered any of the special financial help. He shared the information with his sister so she could look into what was available to her.

As they were researching colleges as well as scholarship opportunities they did a great deal of talking about the advantages and disadvantages of the various schools that they were considering. One evening they told their father and me during dinner that they had decided that they wanted to go to different schools.

Neither of them had decided which school they wanted to attended, but they felt it was important that they have a period of separation. I was surprised that they had come to this decision, my husband and I had also discussed this and had shared with each other that we felt that the two of them needed time apart to develop their own identities. We did not know how we were going to bring up the issue with them, and they solved it on their own.

Both of them applied for several of the scholarship opportunities. Some of the scholarships are based on certain careers, others are based on what you did as a high school student and others are based on athletics. There was one of the scholarship opportunities that I found very interesting.

It was a group from a university that was studying twins. They would fund a large portion of the education if the twins agreed to be part of their study for a ten year period of time. The study was measuring many things, but they needed the ten year commitment so that they could follow the twins over a series of life events. They did not have to go to the university that was doing the study to participate.

My son and daughter thought that this would be an interesting study to take part in. They filled out the application for the scholarship opportunities and submitted them. They were accepted into the study and were granted a four year scholarship.

They need to fill out questionnaires and surveys and return them periodically. They also need to be interviewed several times. The focus of the study is to learn more about twins. They will get a copy of the study when it is completed.