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What We Do

We concentrate on four principal areas: learning enhancement, test preparation, academic writing, and thesis and dissertation writing.

Learning Coaching

Taking a holistic approach, we describe and teach you how to enjoy academic success through enhancing your ability to learn.

• Organization: it all starts with structure. Buildings, lives, and careers need structure. So do students. We’ll talk about everything from your backpack to your brain, stressing and implementing the value and effectiveness of organization.
• Time Management: time is your best friend or worst enemy. Without sufficient time, you can’t accomplish a thing. We’ll examine how you spend your time, suggest activities that could be reduced or controlled better, and show you ways to increase your productivity in whatever amount of time you can devote to your studies.
• Retention: your memory is a key to better grades. Quite obviously, if you remember more of what you read or what the professor says, then you will score higher on tests. We know some great tips and strategies to improve your auditory and visual memory skills.
• Note taking: write it down, folks! The number of students I’ve seen in my teaching career who never take notes is astounding. And it should come as no surprise that the same ones who don’t take notes get F’s. Rarely have I seen a student who doesn’t take notes get A’s or B’s. We’ll show you how to take good notes and how to use them to improve your performance.
• Text marking: work interactively! As you read, you should be marking passages, writing in the margins, and asking the text questions. Forget about selling your textbooks back: keep them. Here’s a novel notion: start a personal library with your textbooks. If you don’t like what you’re learning, then what is the point of you doing to college anyway??? Which leads me to the next skill…
• Attitude Adjustment: get a life! You’re in college, learning, growing, becoming someone! Why aren’t you appreciating that, loving it, celebrating it, enjoying every minute of it?! You should be. You should thank your lucky stars you’re able to go to college and grow intellectually and, hopefully, spiritually through what you are learning. Of course it’s hard and sometimes “boring,” but you simply must screw your head on straight, open your eyes, and be grateful for the opportunity you have been given. Like good, tough football coaches, our coaches will set you straight with a swift kick in the behind if you need it.
• Studying: that’s right, studying! I’ve learned for a fact that less than 40% of college students actually study—at all, not just a little. Folks, how do you think you can possibly learn anything in life without studying??? We’ll examine your study habits, lecture you on the importance of studying, and show you some revolutionary ways to make studying 100% more enjoyable and effective.

Test Preparation Coaching

Alright, I’ve heard it all and it goes like this: you know the material but you just freeze up on tests. Or the test wasn’t fair because the teacher didn’t go over any of it in class or you read the whole textbook but nothing in there was on the test. Listen folks, life isn’t fair. Okay? Get used to it. Think of it this way: Life is an unfair test. So everything you’re exposed to and tormented by in college is preparing you for life and its daily unfair tests, challenges, disappointments, heartaches, and just plain pain. Face it: only the strong survive. So get a grip and bring your game. We’ll show you how to:

• Get your game face on. Taking a test is 90% preparation. If you’re prepared, you’ll be more confident and relaxed. We’ll prepare you to prepare yourself.
• Focus. You’ve never heard anything as practical, simple, and applicable as we’ve got to say about this subject. Listen to our coaches and we’ll have you focusing like your life depends on it.
• Control Anxiety. Stressing out are you? Took your chill pill and still no relief? Part of the problem is lack of preparation. But the other part is getting a grip on your nerves. We’ll put you through stress management boot camp and when you’re done you’ll be able to look down the barrel of a gun without batting an eyelid.

As a bonus, we’ll give you some expert tips. All of our coaches have been or are teachers—test writers. We’ll give you some inside tips on how to maximize your score on all sorts of test questions (multiple choice, true/false, essay, math problems, etc.), whether you know the material or not.

Academic Writing Coaching

You have to write a lot of material in college, so it would help if you could write well. Whether or not you’ve taken writing classes, we’ll put you through our crash course seminar in writing well for academic purposes.

• The basics of grammar. That might not sound like much fun, but you can’t sing well, play baseball well, fix an engine well, or write well without first going over the basics.
• The basics of composition. Putting it all together involves order and structure. We’ll give you the essentials to constructing a solid essay.
• The types of writing. Most of what you’ll be doing in college is analysis and argumentation. We know how to analyze and argue better than most politicians. We’ll show you how in a fast, no nonsense fashion.
• Editing and Proofreading. Once you write the rough draft, what next? We’ll teach you how to polish your prose til it sparkles.
• Understand teacher expectations. You might write something great, but if you don’t do it the way the professor wants it done, you’ll get a bad grade.

Dissertation and Thesis Coaching

If you’re on this level, congratulations. You’re almost home. We’ve got the skills, advice, and desire to take you there. Our coaches address all of the following issues with you:

• Are you having trouble starting or finishing?
• Is your literature review eating you alive?
• Have you bogged down over the proposal or the revisions, the topic itself or the formatting?
• Are your advisor or committee members treating you like a stray dog or mental patient?
• Are you procrastinating, blocked, flipping out, or ready to pack it in?

We’ve seen it all and even been there ourselves, most of us. Your dissertation coach can give you scholarly, academic, technical, psychological, and/or pragmatic advice on how to get it done no matter what the obstacles in your path.