Phil has been tutoring since the third grade, when his teacher turned his desk around to face the class so that he could give the multiplication quiz she had turned into a game. She wanted to find a way to let someone else win for a change. Phil says, “It wasn’t that I was the smartest kid in the class, I just knew how to play the game. College testing is very much the same. I learned to play their game and I play to win.”
He started teaching test prep in 1994 for a little known company called The Princeton Review. Keeping students on and off for more than twenty seven years, Phil honed his teaching skills first for the U.S. Navy as a college NROTC instructor, a Sunday School teacher, a corporate salesman, and then ultimately as a high school teacher at a downtown Pittsburgh charter school. Helping students achieve top test scores is his true passion (and so is brewing beer!).
Phil holds an engineering degree from Penn State, where he attended on a Navy ROTC scholarship and a MBA from Old Dominion, where he taught NROTC. His teaching certificate is through Robert Morris. He lives in historic Old Economy, where the studio is located.