<p>Title Says it all</p>
<p>My school gave us a packet to fill out with a whole bunch of questions regarding our personalities and what interested us. I filled it with what I wanted her to write. If your school doesn’t do this, you can probably type up a paragraph of your interests and hand it to your counselor, and hopefully she’ll use it as a guide on what to write.</p>
<p>My daughter wasn’t given a packet, but a list of questions, about 20 of them, in Sept. and she wrote a paragraph about each of them. He was able to cobble a decent letter based on that. He barely knew her but the letter reflected her pretty well. Since then, he knows her much better and I don’t think he’d change anything!</p>
<p>Our high school uses the following four questions:</p>
<p>1) What are your educational and professional goals and interests?
2) What did you contribute to the school and the community during your years here?
3) What do you perceive to be your biggest strengths and talents?
4) What challenges, if any, did you face that we or the schools to which you are applying should be aware of?</p>
<p>You are not obligated to answer all these questions: It’s just to help the counselor help you. Often, counselors will quote verbatim from the responses, so its worth putting some time into answering the questions. And its good prep for your college essays.</p>
<p>By the way, if your school doesn’t have this list, you could contribute to your school and demonstrate some initiative and creativity by proposing to introduce something like it into the existing college application process. </p>
<p>At my school, we fill out a fairly lengthy survey through Naviance about our interests, goals, ECs, character traits etc. Then, every student has a short interview with their GC. We have kids get into top schools fairly frequently from my HS, so I’m assuming it must work pretty well. </p>