Tom loves proving you can do anything with a B.A. in English. After he graduated with summa honors from Amherst College, he earned a 99th-percentile score on the GRE and a master’s degree in education.

Although he’s been away from home for some time, Tom still considers himself a Southerner at heart. He lived in Alabama and Tennessee before riding the liberal arts wave to the Northeast.

After he graduated, Tom became a New York City Teaching Fellow; he taught high school science for over 5 years in public schools in Harlem and Brooklyn. On any given day he was most likely working with students on a strawberry DNA extraction, building robots, or analyzing structures in cat skeletons. He found an unexpected love in teaching and expects he will take it with him throughout his career.

Tom has long possessed an understanding of the power of standardized tests in propelling one’s education and career. In high school, he earned a score of 5 on seven different AP exams. More recently, he earned 30 college credits from CLEP exams, studying and taking all of them within the span of about 2 months. Strangely enough, he still doesn’t see himself as a “good test taker” – he doesn’t even believe such a thing exists. He hopes he can help his students see through the intimidating veneer of the GRE and view it as a game with certain rules that can be learned and mastered.

When he’s not being a total nerd, Tom can be found cycling, running, hiking, or out seeing all the cool stuff there is to see in the city. He was once an avid mountain unicyclist. Chances are if you ask him what he’s up to, he’ll be into “some new thing” and he’ll be excited to discuss it with you.