Reply to College App Process with weak public HS counselors who are preoccupied with other things

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "College App Process with weak public HS counselors who are preoccupied with other things"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP, I was in your shoes 2-3 years ago. I can't find the thread I started asking these very same questions. I did, however, find a recap I did a year later answering someone just like us who was wondering whether to hire a private college counselor to supplement the big public high school counselor. I cut and pasted it below the asterisks, hope it's helpful.

To address your concerns, the good news is that our big public high school counselor got everything in on time. She had given us bad advice (like telling us two years of language is enough) so I really didn't trust her to get the forms in--but she did, apparently because like PP, our DC got into "one of the highest ranked Ivies."

Is your kid a junior or a senior? Your MCPS school probably (if it's like ours) has an extensive packet you and your kid need to fill out with info about your kid's favorite hobbies and activities. Also, here's where you can prompt the counselor with explanations (illness, whatever) for a bad semester or give him/her other important info (soloed at the Kennedy Center, first in family to go to college) that might not be in the school's own records. The counselors crib from these packets to write the recs.

Starting cut and paste from my old post:
***************

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. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics