The waters required to navigate while applying to an independent school, especially for an international student can be tricky. You can hear horror stories about bad agents and then really great stories about agents who really help their clients find, apply, enrol and even travel to see schools. This past Fall I travelled to Ukraine and Russia with an agency called IQ Consultancy. We have worked with other agents in Russia and Ukraine to be clear, so this is not a unique endorsement of IQ Consultancy. On this trip, we travelled to Kiev, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, Ufa, and Moscow and met with many families. In Russia, for the most part since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are dealing with the first generation of students studying abroad and families traveling more widely than the borders of their former state. Many of the students I met spoke English quite well, however,…