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When searching for colleges and majors, Mindae Kadous met with her high school guidance counselor twice.

The first time they met, they talked about Kadous’s interests. The second time, they tried matching those interests to college programs.

“Looking back, I really feel like I was fishing around in the dark,” Kadous says. “I just kind of took a stab at majors I thought would be interesting or ones I knew I would be successful at.”

Kadous, 22, ended up graduating college with a journalism degree and the confidence to launch her own company. But if you need more personal guidance than your school counselor can give, there are others who can help. Your family could hire an independent counselor to help you through the admissions process.

When you hire an independent counselor, you’re paying for the individualized attention they can give you. They aren’t responsible for 300 other teens, as your high school counselor could be.

“My focus is only on the students that I work with and their families,” says Steve Michaud, owner of Massachusetts-based Family Pathways College Admissions Counseling. “An independent can put the complete focus on college planning for the student and the family.”

The American School Counselor Association recommends that school guidance counselors be in charge of 100 (ideal) to 300 (maximum) students, says Carl Behrend, immediate past president of the National Association of College Admission Counselors (NACAC). But that ratio doesn’t always happen. So for students who require more guidance, hiring an independent college counselor may be the answer.

“The difference is that my course load is different,” says Francine E. Block, an independent counselor for American College Admissions Consultants and past president of the Pennsylvania chapter of NACAC. “I can get out and travel. Being available in the summer is a big help.”

Independent counselors work with you through e-mail, phone and in-person meetings. They can tell you when to visit colleges, help you draft specific questions to ask on campus tours, suggest when to take the PSAT, SAT and ACT, recommend a reasonable time frame for you to complete your applications and even make calls to universities on your behalf. They can also help you bridge the emotional gap between high school and college. Independent counselors can expose you to schools you haven’t already considered and counsel you through writing admissions essays.

“In some cases, I will have students who will come into my office and use my desk to fill out their applications,” says Michaud. “Some use me just to read their essays and make sure everything is fine. Planning for college, going to look at colleges, making that big step from high school to college is a very emotional process. Hopefully a person like me can take the emotion out.”

Don’t think independent college counselors are for Ivy-seekers only. Independents are used by a wide gamut of students. “It runs the entire A to Z,” Michaud says. “There is no trend whether it’s your Ivies or your private schools or your state schools. And I’m grateful for that—it’d get pretty boring if everyone was the same!”

Some independent counselors charge a package fee for their services; others charge hourly. It’s not a charge everyone is willing to spend.

“College is expensive enough,” Kadous says. “I was going to use the resources around me that were free.”

If you don’t feel like your free resources are helping enough, Behrend says you should start by communicating with your school counselor.

“Very often, a gap in communication has caused this problem in the first place,” Behrend says. “That is correctable. A meeting would also ‘focus the spotlight’ on the student for the counselor and cause them to realize that this supportive family and student may need a little more of their precious time.”

If you do hire an independent counselor, Behrend recommends asking a professional association, such as NACAC (www.nacac.com), for a directory of independent counselors in your region.

Though hiring an independent counselor may help you better understand the process, it’s not going to guarantee you admission into a top-choice school.

“I do not sit in their admissions office,” Block says. “I say to families, ‘I can not get you in. There are some schools I can make calls to, but I am not in their admissions office.’ The colleges make their own decisions.”

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