Crush Your Standardized Tests with an Ivy League Expert

I didn’t become obsessed with test prep because I love talking about obscure vocabulary words or calculating what time two trains leaving from different cities will meet each other if they travel at different speeds. (Although both of those can be kind of fun.)

I became obsessed with it because I saw how much power these exams hold over people’s futures, and I wanted to understand why these test questions are easy for some people and hard for others.

I studied philosophy at Dartmouth College, later completed a master’s in education, and kept asking the same question: what actually helps students think better, perform better, and stop feeling intimidated by high-stakes tests?

Along the way, I taught in a Korean-American hagwon, coaching a large group of non-native speakers and working within a system that puts much more emphasis on mock tests and sheer hours spent than most Americans are accustomed to. 

I taught SAT, SHSAT, and other exams for The Princeton Review, and developed materials for their books and courses. I moved to Manhattan Prep (now owned by Kaplan), where I taught the GMAT, authored Manhattan's original Foundations of GMAT Verbal book, and developed a series of seminars on Intellectual Performance Enhancement (a fancy way of saying "study skills").

When the GRE started becoming more popular for business school, Manhattan Prep appointed me the first-ever GRE instructor and curriculum designer. I developed the slide decks and materials used by later instructors, and later pitched and edited the bestselling 5 Lb Book of GRE Practice Problems.

Since then, I have been privately coaching students for the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and a few other exams (there are a lot of exams out there, but there's also quite a bit of overlap).

But credentials alone don’t raise scores. You have to be, well ... a nice person (I think I do pretty well!) And interesting enough to make dry material a little bit exciting. I endeavor to get to know people intellectually by figuring out why they make the mistakes they do. If there are two valid solutions to a math problem, which would better fit my student's strengths? If my student gets hit with a certain type of reading passage, are they relieved or daunted? Teaching isn't just conveying information from one person to another; people learn by mapping new information onto an intellectual framework they already possess, so I need to understand that framework to know where my teaching will land, and to help the student retrieve newly-won skills on test day.

Over the years, I’ve coached students with wildly different strengths, concerns, and goals – from Wall Street bankers to teens in Singapore to older adults going back to school for an eMBA to – occasionally – members of a royal family (no, not the British one!) Some needed structure, some needed specific content knowledge before a looming deadline, and some needed someone who could finally explain the test in a way that made it click.

Today, I work with students around the world online and in person in New York City. My mission is simple: take everything I know about logic, learning, and standardized tests, and use it to help my clients turn stress into mastery and ambition into results.