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[quote=Anonymous]Our kids are in a large MoCo school and we, too, considered hiring a private counselor for DC#1. In fact, my post asking this very same question is probably still somewhere in the DCUM archives.

Things really have changed since our day, wrt APs, SATIIs, essay-writing, and wrt the competitiveness of the colleges that we got into. So you're right to look for help. Don't just assume that you can do what you did, back in the day, and it will all work out. The question is, do you need to hire this help, or can you figure it out yourself?

I got some helpful answers here two years ago. After going through the process with DC#1, I agree with most of the advice I got. Since people were so helpful to me, I'll try to recapitulate (other PPs, feel free to add on).

Basically, your need for a private counselor boils down to how you answer/view the questions below.
(1) How much free time and interest do you have to do your own research? There are books to read (Crazy U, of course, but also Fiske, maybe Price of Admission, a book or two on what the process looks like these days). There are Naviance and College Confidential to spend hours navigating. And as a base, there will be unavoidable, normal school transcript and counseling office demands  that you will have to do anyway, and as a minimum, at your W school.
(2) Do you get frustrated and/or overwhelmed by lots of information and choices? Or do you see this as a fun challenge and maybe a chance to bond with your kid?
(3) Your kid - can you rely on you kid to do a lot of the work? Or are you thinking, as you read this, that you are dreading the process and you will really need a neutral third party to push your kid to write the essays?  
(4) How much of a financial stretch will hiring a counselor be for you? Is this money you could save for college, or is this money you can spare?
(5) How good are you at dealing with professionals? Can you fire them, and say "no" to the $3,000 package if you don't think you need it? There are better and worse professionals in every profession, and I'm sure this profession is no different. 
(6) How good is your ability to avoid helicoptering the whole process? Urging your kid not to write his essay about the service trip to Honduras, because you read the books and you know that topic is a bad idea, is totally different from writing the essay for him.

There may be some more things I haven't remembered, but these are what stick in my mind.

When I asked on DCUM, lots of people said we could do this ourselves. And we did. As you might suspect, we have a decent amount of time in the evenings and DC#1 was really motivated. And if you want to know how it ended, DC got into one of the most selective colleges in the country.[/quote]

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