Which is the best admissions consultancy or educational consultant for study abroad?
When you start planning your study abroad, you also start thinking of taking help of an Educational consultant. If you google, you will find many educational / admission consultancies and the obvious next question would be how to choose one. Here are 5 pointers that would help you on how to concentrate your efforts:
- Pick up the phone: Make a list of few consultancies and call each one. How you get attended in this first call would help you short-list a few.
- Leverage free counseling session: Many educational consultancies offer a first free counselling session. Make use of the same to understand the firm’s approach. Avoid the ones who give you set answers and a pre-worked list of MBA schools. Try working with those who try to understand your background, specific needs, and future goals.
- To partner, or not to partner: If you want to go to a particular university and one of the consultancies is a partner, feel free to go and meet one of the consultants in-person (or skype / phone). You will have a chance to meet adcom members of that specific university face-to-face. Else, avoid the ones who partner with specific universities because then you will have to apply to those universities whether you want to or not.
- Proven track record: Once you have shortlisted 3–4, find out how much were the consultancies helpful to some of their past clients. Try to talk to the past clients to see how satisfied were they with a particular firm. Assess which service/s the consultancy was really useful, which area needed to improve and where it could not perform up to the expectations, etc. Then it would easy for you to pick up a couple of the firms which excel in the area where you need utmost help. Also, find out if the advisers were able to respond within a reasonable time. You would not want to miss an admission round just because the review of your SOPs / essays was delayed, would you?
- Say Yes to flexibility: Now most importantly, find out how much each firm costs and what services each one provides, whether the consultancy has only one package for everyone or does the firm decide a package based on your needs (prefer this!), is the advisory ready to change the number of universities later, does the firm let you upgrade or downgrade the package once you join, etc.
We hope this helps. If you like, we will be glad to help you with your admission process.
