If your parents have a lot of moolah, you can get all the SAT help that you need but if you're not too rich, you're on your own. Now a young entrepreneur has decided to democratize the process and level the playing field a bit. Karan Goel, just 21 years old, is co-founder and CEO of Prepme.com. (www.prepme.com) which offers personalized, one-on-one tutoring for half the price of other SAT tutoring, making premium preparation accessible and affordable to students everywhere.
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Goel was named the U.S. Small Business Administration's Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and was just awarded the first annual Vashee Promising Entrepreneur Award, which has been sponsored by University of Chicago alumnus Vijay and Sita Vashee. It's just the latest in a number of awards for Goel and PrepMe, which was named the grand prize winner of the annual Fortune Small Business Magazine Student Showdown competition.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in only three years, Goel got his MBA at the age of 21. Along with Joe Jewell and Avichel Garg, both exceptional students themselves, Goel started PrepMe, willing to pass on the trade secrets to other aspiring students on how to land a perfect SAT. Garg has a masters from Stanford and works at Google, while Jewell is a Rhodes Scholar who's co-authored a best-selling SAT book.
The software is $499 and includes four months of unlimited tutoring online and live tutoring in the evening, and PrepMe currently has over a thousand students. "It's about taking a really student-centric approach to the program and is uniquely customized to each student," says Goel. All of the tutors are Stanford and University of Chicago students with very high scores.
He adds, "The advantage is they've taken the SAT themselves recently and they are funny and engaging, so the students have a good rapport with them. We do a lot of analysis on where students are weak, so our system is very technologically advanced. We have students even in China and India, so it makes it not only financially accessible but geographically as well." |
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