Cat grew up in Boston and majored in music and English at Harvard University. A grad school junkie, she finished an M.A. in English at the University of Cape Town and is now pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia University. Thanks to a strong GRE score (169Q/170V), she began working with the amazing group of teachers at Manhattan Prep in 2015.

While living in Cape Town, Cat taught at a local high school, where she learned that it’s really hard to interest kids in English literature when their classroom has a view of the beach, but that she really loved teaching anyway. After returning to Boston, she spent the next several years at a variety of jobs. Having tried everything from finance and legal consulting to waitressing and driving a delivery truck, she’s confident that the work she loves most is teaching and writing fiction.

Cat has had a weird affinity for standardized tests since she first started filling in bubbles in elementary school. As an adult, she’s had the opportunity to design SAT prep classes for several after-school programs in the Boston area; she enjoys picking apart the way these tests think and convincing her students that anyone and everyone can excel on them. Having also been a college admissions consultant, she really loves working with people at transitional points in their lives and helping them to overcome the test prep hurdles that stand between them and their dream schools and careers.

Cat writes about a lot of different subjects and is happy to tell you more than you wanted to know about any of them if you ask her. To escape the tyranny of her laptop, she plays violin and does yoga and triathlon. It’s a given that she loves reading, but she loves TV just as much and, in her next life, wants to move to LA and write comedy. She enjoys anything that can be done outside and exploring (i.e. eating her way through) her new home in New York City.