Erik Kolb

Erik is a broadly experienced, highly sought-after tutor who works remotely with students around the world. As a content expert and master strategist, he has proved to be an invaluable resource for students who wish to improve their test scores, seek guidance on the next stage of their educational journeys, or find someone to help shepherd them through complicated coursework and writing projects. He works remotely part of the year from his home in the Washington, D.C. area and spends the rest of his time as a digital nomad, working while traveling the world.

Born in Norway, Erik spent much of his childhood in Cameroon, Sweden, and Côte d’Ivoire. His first foray into teaching was as an undergraduate, when he tutored the children of West African refugee families living in the Chicago area and volunteered in a weekly program teaching the GED to inmates at Chicago’s Cook County Jail. During his summer breaks, he served as an Assistant Facilitator at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, VA, teaching children of diplomats about security at U.S. embassies abroad. He also taught at the Huntington Learning Center, was the High School Program Director for the Foreign Service Youth Foundation, and was the teaching assistant for several undergraduate courses while in graduate school.

While working on his master’s degree at Yale, Erik first trained to teach the SAT as a part-time job for a nationally recognized test prep company. He quickly discovered that he could adapt SAT test-taking strategies to other tests as well and began to train for and teach additional subjects such as the ACT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT. After working on a Ph.D. in ancient Mediterranean history at the Catholic University of America, Erik decided to transition to full-time tutoring and writing, joining Inspirica Pros in 2016.

Over the course of his career, Erik has worked with thousands of students of all ages and score levels and has helped them to meet and often exceed their personal goals (breaking into the 1500s on the SAT, nailing the ACT English section, raising that APUSH grade from a B+ to an A, gaining admittance to a dream MBA program, and everything in between). Erik is demanding but very personable–his goal when working with students is always first and foremost to help them to be prepared, confident, and ready to meet any testing or other academic challenge they may face. Moreover, Erik’s deep knowledge of the admissions world (high school, college, and graduate/professional school) makes him an outstanding resource for students who need help with the application process, whether it’s choosing the right school or crafting the perfect essay.

In addition to his work as a tutor and educational advisor, Erik is a published author who has written academic history articles as well as content and practice questions for test prep publications. Among other projects, he contributed significantly to books, websites, and other published study materials for the SAT, numerous history and social studies AP exams, and the social studies portions of the TASC and GED exams.

Erik believes that the best teachers and tutors are engaged and interested in the world, and, as such, never stop learning. He stays current with broad educational trends related to standardized testing and the various subjects he teaches through in-house professional development as well as through active participation in professional organizations such as the National Test Prep Association (NTPA) and the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC). Moreover, Erik regularly exercises his intellectual curiosity by taking online courses in subjects as diverse as Intercultural Competency in Education, Deep Learning through Transformative Pedagogy, and Developmental Psychology.

Among other skills he acquired in graduate school, Erik is a trained papyrus conservator and has studied eleven different languages (four of which are “dead languages” that are no longer spoken). On a personal level, Erik’s hobbies include cooking, watching Nordic noirs, and attending live music events. His early exposure to travel and foreign language has stuck with him into adulthood, and it’s not often that he’ll remain in one place for more than two or three months in a row. Students love to hear his stories about eating fruit that (some say) tastes like raw sewage in southeast Asia, navigating the varieties of wild game for sale in the marketplaces of east Africa, spending the night in the Sahara desert, and climbing ancient jungle temples in Central America. To date, he has been to 78 countries and is slowly working on the rest.

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