Axel

About Me

I began assisting students in college admissions when I was first getting my Master's degree. The various startup education and enrichment centers that gave me my first step into professional teaching turned to me when no one else had the modern experience in admissions counseling, and I have successfully been guiding young students to their choice institutions for a decade now. I keep up with the changing landscape of applying to universities every year and I still hear back from some students about how important my help was in getting ahead.

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Tutoring Style

I teach to make sure that students feel both supported and in control of their own ideas. I guide them through their own unique creative process in a way that makes writing in long essays accessible. Every person, and certainly every potential college student, has a unique voice, unique experiences, and a unique relationship with language, and I see my job as helping them come to awareness of these facts as much as possible and to be an expert's voice in areas of style, word-choice, and the workings of the college admissions system.

Success Story

As a young adjunct working in my first community college, I helped a student through many hours and many meetings. This was a student who had never been educated in the college admissions process and had a hard time applying even for the local community college. We eventually learned, in a quite smooth process, how college credits work, how their transfers work, her progress so far, and at the end we were able to draft a personal statement. She was able to complete her move to a 4-year institution that summer.

More recently, I was working with a student who was very accomplished not just academically but throughout her life; she was an intern in a large company, active in her town's charity and volunteer work scene, and had done a lot of social media campaigns around issues affecting her community. She had found it difficult to see her large portfolio of work and turn it into a compelling narrative for her essay, but with my help and after many drafts to many different questions, she was able to create two extremely effective and emotional essays and was eventually accepted into a top university on the west coast.

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Hobbies & Interests

My first loves were reading and writing, and I try my very best when I'm not working to keep up with what people are printing and publishing everywhere in the world and not focus so much on the classics. I also like to learn new languages and am currently trying to autodidact my way to proficiency in some Mesoamerican languages. And when I don't feel like being intellectual, I game a lot and practice cooking pastries.

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