NEED A GUIDE?
Six months, 40,000 and an admission offer later, engineer Tanuj Jain asks whether foreign education counselling programmes are really necessary
Counsellors do help but it is not worth the hefty fees. With a little Internet research one can avoid both the services and the bills.”
For me, Germany was an alien land. The only information I had was that the quality of education was good and the courses were advanced. Apart from this, I had no knowledge of job prospects or which universities to apply to. So I invested 40,000 on a six month course with an education counselling service.
With the counsellor's help I was able to make a good selection of universities to apply to. Having access to these counsellors meant that I also had access to their vast database of students who had already availed of their services and were now studying in Germany. I got in touch with a few of these students to get first- hand feedback on various universities.
At my first session the counsellors asked for my profile which included my 10th and 12th graduation marks along with GRE and TOEFL/ IELTS scores. They also asked me about my academic interests. After this, they began a shortlisting process during which they selected a few universities that suited my requirements and profile. Over the course of the next six months they assisted me with the entire college application process. Once I received my offer from the university I was asked to attend a visa counselling session to verify all my documents.
I began attending counselling sessions in February this year. Looking back now I realise that the services which I paid for could have been made redundant with a little more research on my part. Yes, counsellors do help you but it is not worth the fees that they charge. If I had to I would not take the same route again but instead would rely on my personal contacts and the Internet.
Online research is an excellent way to get whatever information you are looking for. All foreign universities have user- friendly websites that provide, in very simple English, information about the course content, fee structures and application requirements. The information on these websites can be completely trusted. And if you are still confused then there are many student forums that will answer your queries for free. What education counsellors tend to do is actually nothing more than Internet research. I soon realised that for every query I sent in, most of the answers I received were lifted verbatim from websites. In a way, I ended up paying the consultants for just using the Internet on my behalf.
Reading up on foreign colleges is not rocket science. All you really need to do is to plan ahead and remain focused. This will spare you from having to add a hefty counselling payment to your monthly budget.
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