Author: tlcfairfield

I remember suffering through law school and realizing that I better learn to beat boredom or I would have a long three years.  Our students need the same resolve. “I’m so bored.” “Reading history is so boring.” “I fall asleep in chemistry class.” When we work with students across Connecticut, we hear different complaints related […]

Yes, there is some madness related to the college process.  But whenever we discuss college with our students, we provide the context for why college matters beyond the obvious career implications. My wife and I met in college. That’s not particularly uncommon. While likely a dated statistic, at some point, 25% of college graduates met their […]

When I practiced law in a large Washington, DC firm in the 1990s, I worked with a brilliant tax attorney who solved intricate tax issues for large international corporations. Yet, he hired someone to do his own taxes. “Too complicated,” he said, half-seriously because we both knew he could figure out how to do his […]

We have heard more than a few private college counselors in Fairfield County suggest that students should focus on either the SAT or the ACT.  While we respect most such counselors, our experience has been that most college counselors are not test prep experts.  This issue creates another example. The SAT and ACT were never […]

Katie was accepted into a top liberal arts school and surprised her parents by thanking them for all the math tutoring they supplied. Katie had first started working with us as a freshman while at a prep school in Fairfield County.  She entered our sessions very reluctantly. But she had not mastered fractions, ratios, percentages […]

“David said he finally is learning math concepts due to your SAT class.”  A parent of a student from Fairfield, CT said to me a few years ago. Perhaps the biggest misconceptions propagated by those who do not understand the SAT (or ACT) is that the test can be beaten by “strategy.” Certainly there are […]

Since we work with students from schools throughout Connecticut, we have a deep comparative understanding of the strength of different Connecticut High Schools. If your child attends one of the stronger schools in the area – Darien, Greenwich, Westport, Ridgefield, New Canaan, among others that come to mind – I have some good news and […]

The University of Connecticut has become an increasingly attractive option to Fairfield County, Connecticut parents and students for two big reasons: (1) UCONN has become a much more desirable college than it was when parents from Connecticut attended/applied and (2) UCONN is a far better value than many private colleges due to its in-state tuition […]

Great Big Think video: Fareed Zakaria on universities as employer filters The simple summary is that we live in a knowledge economy.  College provides a filtering mechanism for employers to quickly sort out who to interview among thousands of applications.  Zakaria uses the example of a Wall Street investment bank with 20,000 plus applicants and a […]

   “What is the smallest thing you could do differently that would lead to better grades?” I asked Rob, a sophomore in Darien, CT. Like most boys, Rob was bored during class, distracted during his homework, and unmotivated about what he needed to do for college. The big shifts that his parents demanded were not working. […]