A native of North Carolina with a surprisingly un-Southern accent, Whitney Garner has been entertaining debate over her origins since high school. Always a bit of a nerd, to this day she still makes a sport of challenging people’s opinion of “good ole’ Southerners.” (And if you don’t believe that she’s Southern, just try her homemade sausage biscuits and gravy!) That nerdiness paid off while she was working on her graduate degree in economics at UNC-Greensboro’s Bryan School. There she found that she not only had a skill for learning the material, but also for helping others find the simplicity in even the most complex macroeconomic theories.

This skill allowed Whitney to supplement her Teaching & Research assistantship income by helping students of all ages unravel the mysteries of any and every subject she could get her hands on: from arithmetic to calculus, history and English to chemistry. (She even taught real estate exams!) But it was GMAT test preparation that really swept Whitney off her feet. What could be better than a test that covers multiple subjects and works to try to complicate things just for the sake of complicating them? She often thinks about the test writers as sadistic geniuses who need to be defeated at their own game, and she therefore works to turn students into GMAT Super Heroes by test day. It worked for her – she earned herself a score of 770.

Whitney tried to leave teaching and join the cubicle ranks as a research economist, but after a year she found herself running back to the challenges and thrills that come from helping students improve. Since then, Whitney has instructed over 3000 students, most in test preparation. She’s currently working to teach her three rescue dogs the ins-and-outs of GMAT prep (but they don’t really seem to grasp the whole adaptive testing thing…guess they need more work). Whitney fills the rest of her free time with yoga and naps, and she still loves to read about the economic research that other folks are doing. And while Whitney always embraces her inner nerd, she also works to show the world that Math-letes can be adventurous too: you can find her most weekends at a nearby dropzone training with her fellow skydivers.