Why Hire a College Admissions Consultant?

The field of college consulting is more varied and complex than it was just 10 years ago. With social media, YouTube, and the vast array of information available on the Internet, students have more opportunities to gain knowledge and information on own their own.  Students are able to pursue talents and passions that make the college admissions process more exciting, yet more challenging.

 

Hiring a college admissions consultant helps families navigate this challenging time for their family and ensures that students find a college that fits aligns with their values and will help them achieve what they want for their life. Academic Life Coaching approaches the college application from the perspective of how to help students develop their own deeper understanding of themselves, the way they study, their unique values, interests and passions.  It also looks at strategies to help them develop their leadership, all of which is useful for the the college application process.

 

College admissions officers are looking for evidence that students have developed their emotional intelligence and have shown potential to be leaders in society. The problem is that high schools usually don't teach those kinds of skills and assume that students learn the skills on their own without help or without support from others. Sometimes students gain these skills from a sports coach or from a summer program, but most the time students don't engage the kinds of conversations that they would experience in a life coaching setting.  These conversations really do help students create stronger college application essays, perform better in interviews, and ultimately choose schools that get where they want to go in education and life.

 

By using an organic approach to the college application, students write stronger essays and use the college admissions process as a vehicle and a path to develop personally. From this perspective, the student’s personal development and the development of the leadership is what is really going to help them thrive as an adult with an effective and fulfilled life. Most college admissions consultants focus merely on school choice and helping choose a topic for an essay in setting up visits to colleges. These are all tasks that come easily to students who can figure out the bigger picture and understand that if they take proactive action in this area, all of the other actions in other areas in their life fall into place.

 

The additional challenge for students in the college admissions process is that this is the first time they are embarking on a project that spans over months and involves other people, such as getting recommendations and conducting interviews. It's also a time when high school students look back at everything that they have accomplished and ask themselves who they are and how they fit in with society. When students ask these kinds of questions in the context of life coaching they have an incredible opportunity to answer those questions mindfully and move past limiting beliefs and the things that might hold them back from accomplishing their goals.