Engineer's Guide to US Visas 12 years ago
I applied for J-1 waiver last summer. It's a painful bureaucratic process but it's not too hard to follow. You have to fill up DS-3035 [1] and get a no objection certificate from your embassy or government. Most embassies in US have some standard procedure for sending no objection certificate directly. After that, they'll take about a couple of months to approve your waiver.
You can do it all by yourself and in total you won't have to pay more than $500 ($215 for DS-3035 + fee for no objection letter.) Go for it!
[1] http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/study-exchange...