Biography

I am passionate about education and seek to connect AJ Tutoring’s students, their parents, and our team members with the information and tools necessary to enrich their lives.

As one of AJ Tutoring’s two founders, I work with our tutors, our staff, and our clients to ensure that AJ Tutoring is fulfilling its mission to provide top-notch test preparation and academic tutoring to families across the Bay Area. My primary role is to put together the most gifted and most passionate team of SAT, ACT, academic tutors, and college counselors anywhere in the country. To that end, I oversee training and provide support and resources for the AJ tutoring team and seek to match their gifts with clients’ needs. I also invest time collaborating with teachers, school officials, and parents to make sure that AJ is constantly adapting and improving to meet the needs of our students.

My experience in the tutoring business dates back to my college days at UC Davis, when I discovered a passion for, of all things, standardized tests! For six years, I drove my beat up Volvo from San Jose to Hillsborough to San Francisco to Marin, meeting with high school students in their homes to prepare for the SAT, ACT, and SAT Subject exams, which I studied to the point that I could recite entire practice tests from memory. It was during this time that I began to appreciate the incredible educational potential of the one-on-one and small group tutor-student relationship. My students would routinely see improvements in their scores more than twice as great as those touted by the corporate test-prep giants. I began to wonder whether it would be possible to pass on my own passion and test expertise to a new set of tutors, tutors with their own academic gifts and specific teaching styles, and whether together we could extend the advantages of private tutoring to an even wider range of families.

It was with this vision that Joe Niederman and I launched AJ Tutoring, and I am thrilled to say that nine years later the vision has come true in ways I could not have imagined. AJ Tutoring now offers coaching not only for the SAT and ACT, but also AP Exams, GRE, GMAT, every major academic subject taught at the high school level, and with college admission counseling. Our tutors and Counselors hail from many of the nation’s top universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech and Cornell. We consistently outperform other test prep groups in terms of score improvement and customer satisfaction, and partly for that reason, our client base has more than doubled in size each of the last three years. Working with this immensely talented crop of tutors, and watching them further AJ’s commitment to providing the Bay Area with the best in private test prep tutoring, academic tutoring, and college counseling, has been the most satisfying professional experience of my life.

In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with my wife and daughters, camping, hiking, cooking and reading.