The Elizabeth King Coaching Team

The only thing we don’t take seriously is ourselves.

We’re a group of actual friends who couldn’t resist the lure of working together.

We’ve been the Elizabeth King Coaching “Kitchen Cabinet” for years… and we’re all specialists in other worlds, too. (We couldn’t exactly expect you to act on your own varied intellectual and creative curiosities while being one-hit wonders ourselves, right?)

If you want to stand out, you want people on your team who know a little bit about everything and a lot about most things.

That’s why you’re not looking at an “About” page full of college crests and lists of universities that used to employ us. Rather, we bring you decades of experience knowing what colleges and universities actually want because they have explicitly told us. In person. Over coffee.

Ok, but did any of you ever work at, say, UPenn? 

Were we admissions counselors at [[redacted Ivy League schools]]? No. Are we personal friends with admissions counselors and the tip-top-level leadership that shapes the schools you probably want to attend? Yes. Do we know their preferred beverages at a party? Yes. 

Do we think that’s an advantage? Yes, again.

What about those other tutoring and advising companies we’re thinking about hiring?

It bears spelling out that Elizabeth has iron-clad NDAs. That being said, did she spend years in a cab up and down Park Ave working for that super-elite tutoring and Ivy League counseling company? Yes. Did she work for the largest boutique firm in South Florida? Yes. Have her students’ parents regularly appeared in People or Fast Company? Yes. Ever traveled to a private island to teach for the day? Yes. So there’s that.

Elizabeth King TLDR: Published by Random House/Ten Speed Press and McGraw-Hill. Gets such good results for her students on the SAT&ACT she was cased during the College Admissions Scandal. That didn’t matter: her students just earn excellent scores. Notorious truth-teller. Loves teaching writing. Former pro actor/singer. Owns a nascent organic, regenerative farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Author Elizabeth King has 21+ years of experience prepping students all over the world for the SAT, ACT, GRE, and other college admissions standardized tests. Her distinct approach to test prep has been published in her two books, Outsmarting the SAT ('08) and Acing the ACT ('15, both Ten Speed/Random House). Elizabeth is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College (‘01) and holds a special Bachelor of Arts degree in Cultural Economics, which essentially marries economics and math with art history and studio art. Outside of test preparation but inside this wheelhouse, Elizabeth has served as an academic coach and home school facilitator. Early in her career she designed and taught an entire SACS-accredited individualized 9th grade curriculum one-on-one to a high-IQ, at-risk student.

She is a 50CAN National Voices Fellow (2020) and a member of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College Learning & Design M.Ed. incoming cohort in 2020. In a bizarre plot twist, once she enrolled, the faculty suggested she withdraw from the master’s program because she was overqualified and pursue a PhD instead.

Elizabeth often mentors other professionals and coaches in the area of career advancement. She is the co-author of Lou Imbriano’s Winning the Customer (McGraw-Hill ‘11), served as a volunteer mentor for Startup Weekend along the eastern seaboard, and has gone on to directly advise companies emerging from that program, including one that appeared on the television show Shark Tank. Always interested in blazing her own trail, Elizabeth was highlighted by Fast Company as part of "Generation Flux." She has been quoted in the New York Times for her thoughts about testing and has appeared all over national radio, including the Oprah Radio Network and Business Radio @ Wharton. She has served on several advisory boards in the education arena for the Office of the Mayor of West Palm Beach, FL, and is a founding board member of the North Shore Music Festival, a New York 501c3.

Elizabeth’s generous spirit and tough-mindedness bring out the best in her students and clients. She’s also a new mom, a serious cook, and a budding horticulturalist. She’s interested in design and is rehabbing the crazy-making, totally romantic 1881 antique McMansion that sits in the middle of the farm she owns with her husband, Michael.

Michael Weisman TLDR: Brown. Pro blues musician. Regenerative Farmer. Polymath. Hilarious. Speaks Spanish. Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Michael Weisman is our confirmed polymath. A Brown alum with a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnomusicology, Michael brings a combination of incredible practicality and insightful creativity to his work with students. Michael works with our students on the ACT and SAT, and he’s also an outstanding academic coach with a nuanced understanding of learning differences like ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and anxiety. He has worked closely on test preparation with Elizabeth for over five years and personally digitized and categorized our database of sample test questions for both the SAT and ACT. He also tutors for AP Economics, AP Calculus, and AP Music Theory.

Michael’s exceptional giftedness (our words, not his) and multifaceted professional and life experiences make him an ideal fit for the profoundly gifted and motivated students on our roster, and his empathy and kindness allow him to connect with even the most challenging students. 

An accomplished guitarist and sound engineer, Michael became a professional blues musician while still at Francis W. Parker High School in Chicago, which led him to an early television career. Looking for more fulfillment, after earning his degree, he worked as an artist’s assistant to Professor Richard Fishman, for whom he designed and built custom oversized sculpture tools; he simultaneously ran a fine woodworking business out of his home.

When he’s not teaching, he puts his expansive practical problem-solving, engineering, and science know-how to use at the historic home and regenerative farm he owns and runs on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Elizabeth and their little muppet of a baby.

TLDR: Your Secret Weapon. Comparative Literature Degree. Writes all the viewbooks. The Ether.

************ is a writer and editor who has worked with students and academic institutions for decades. She is a principal at an east coast agency whose clientele includes the very same educational institutions to which our students apply, the sort of “secret shopper” on our team–she’s been on the inside of dozens of top-tier admissions and enrollment teams and knows what they’re looking for. 

This second reader ensures that our students employ the right language and details to best align their own identities and values with the particular fit of any given school. She has been a content strategist from the get-go and has worked extensively with non-profits/NGOs, which positions her as a perfect consultant for student grant writing. She attended a university outside the US and is another one of our Stanford Admits who didn’t happen to attend.

When she’s not juggling words, she can be found in the kitchen inventing recipes, obsessing about making life more hygge, or road-tripping with her family to any shoreline, anywhere. Wish we could tell you who she is. She’s great.

Susan Perlstein TLDR: HECA member. West Coast Admissions Expertise. Generous Guiding Light. Marin.

Susan Perlstein, formerly of Perlstein College Advising, has joined us to offer specific consultation on West Coast colleges and the UC system applications and culture. While she’s closed her own private practice and is happy to be enriching her life with other endeavors, she’s at the ready when we need her: the West Coast is covered.

Daniel Klein TLDR: Carnegie Mellon. UCLA. Full-time Professional Opera Singer. Productivity Obsessed. Speaks German & Italian. NYC.

Daniel Klein is a performer, educator, and the founding director of the New York 501c3 North Shore Music Festival; he joins our team as an academic coach and college planning advisor for students on the musician’s or performance artist’s path. He is adept at helping those who might not consider themselves linear thinkers institute productivity and organizational habits like Getting Things Done (GTD), Bullet Journaling, Building a Second Brain (BASB), Zettlekasten, and the five tenets of The Musician’s Way. Dan can assist students with material development, technique, and musicianship as well as all the theory that appears on the AP Music exam. If you’re applying to a conservatory, Dan is your guy.

Dan is also renowned in the opera profession for the memory techniques he uses to develop both the multi-lingual fluencies required of classical artists and learn and retain scores with superb attention to detail. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Vocal Performance from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master of Music in Vocal Arts from the University of Southern California. Fluent in English, Dan is also fluent in and an active student of German and Italian. He has attended the Universita per Stranieri di Perugia, Perugia IT, and Die Neue Schule, Berlin DE to continue his language studies, and has performed in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Ladino, Swedish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Taino–along with a smattering of other languages.

Dan has been a private voice instructor for over 25 years on Long Island and in New York City and has been guest faculty of the Brevard Music Center, International Summer Music Festival of Morelia, Mexico; he also teaches master classes for composers writing in the operatic idiom. Dan’s students have gone on to attend–among others–Julliard, Indiana University, Peabody Conservatory, Carnegie Mellon University, San Francisco Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, and Vanderbilt University, as both voice majors and musical theater majors. One of them won a Grammy in 2019. Most receive merit-based scholarships for their voice, and some have received full scholarships plus a stipend to attend voice performance programs. Students routinely go on to All-State and All-Eastern Choirs and are regularly finalists and winners in regional voice competitions.

TLDR: Mount Holyoke. Psychologist and Pyschoeducational Testing Guru. Runner. Westport.

Dr. Lindsay Blass has served as our consulting psychologist for years. Time and again Lindsay has offered us practical advice that bolsters our holistic approach to students’ well-being and success.  

Lindsay has been conducting psychoeducational evaluations for more than twenty years, and she is also available for individual therapy for our students and their families*. Her wisdom and nuanced approaches to student anxiety and emotional struggles in concert with pinpointed analysis and diagnosis of learning and neurological differences have been invaluable to our practice. Even if Lindsay does not conduct your child’s evaluation, she is a wonderful resource for making sense and practical use of the often confusing and misleading Wechsler Scales and their contributing skills. 

Dr. Blass received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College. She obtained her Master’s degree in School Psychology in 2004 and her doctorate in Combined School-Clinical Psychology in 2007, both from the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University. She completed her pre-doctoral internship at NYU Child Study Center and also served as the program director at Queens Hospital Center’s Center for Child Development before entering into private practice.

 *licensed in Connecticut, New York, and Florida and available in 30 states in 2024 via Counseling Compact

TL;DR: Former Marine Sergeant. Nationally recognized yoga teacher and practitioner. Trauma care. UNC

Stressed about school? Wrestling with “test anxiety?” We’re calling Claire Santos. Claire is a former Marine Sergeant (Meritorious) and a world-class yoga instructor (think Oprah’s The Life You Want Tour) who has spent the last two decades studying trauma and its effects on the individual and the community. She holds a degree in psychology from UNC and a certificate in public management, and she’ll complete a degree in clinical mental health counseling at Johns Hopkins University in 2026. She works with our students on mindfulness, self-efficacy, anxiety, and mental toughness, all of which are as applicable to at testing scenario as they are in the athletic arena.

Claire has traveled throughout the US teaching trauma-informed intervention practices to front-line outreach service providers including medical and mental health and legal professionals, school teachers, foster care providers, and community leaders. She works through mindfulness, breath, and movement interventions for the long-term resolution of stress indicators, increased resilience, and a greater capacity to enjoy daily life. She’s also particularly insightful on finding ways to reach underserved populations in a manner that is respectful, thoughtful, and characterized by humility and can advise on what we used to call “passion projects” that are centered around community intervention. 

She has served as a board member for Mindful Heart (501c3) based in Atlanta, GA, and as National Trauma-Informed Yoga/Meditation teacher training faculty for Connection Coalition (501c3) based in Miami, FL.

TL;DR: UNC. Performance Coach. Former US Olympic Development and Semi-pro Soccer Player. Yoga Teacher. DJ. Charlotte.

Joshua specializes in existential psychotherapy: the kind of therapy in which we grapple with how each of us fits into the world. It can be a turbulent process to strike out on a life worth living–a process that involves tremendous courage. Josh is particularly attuned to those who struggle with generalized anxiety and offers performance coaching for those who wrestle with the specific pressures of high-stakes test performance.

Josh is a former semi-professional soccer player. It’s his athletic background that informs his understanding of anxiety as a source of learning, transformation, and growth. As a U-16 region 1 player for the Olympic Development Program and NY state club champion, he knows what it’s like to have to perform under pressure. 

He’s also a source of sympatico for the team and our students, continually reminding us and our clients that the feeling of success from attaining a goal is in direct proportion to the fearful challenges and pains within the process it took to get there. Risk is essential to making dreams become reality. He is a National Board Certified Counselor (NCC) and Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) and received a master of arts in clinical mental health counseling and Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from UNC.

TL;DR: media savant who founded Buzzfeed’s largest competitor; fixture on the global travel-writing scene; runs a golf media platform; Orlando

Ashley Burn’s career as a full-time writer and media professional began in typical maverick style: via dare. A life-long pro-grade sports fan with zero formal writing training, he was urged at a bar by a college buddy to apply for a sports editor opening at the Central Florida Future, the enormous student newspaper of the University of Central Florida and a member of the USA Today network. A year later, he was managing the newsroom.

Meanwhile, Ashley recognized the emergence of digital media in its earliest stages and built several successful niche blogs that earned multiple Orlando Sentinel Annual Reader Awards, which led to connections with other high-profile U.S. bloggers. Like a nerdier Voltron, they came together to build the pop culture website Uproxx, which, at its peak, welcomed more than 28 million unique visitors per month (second only to the juggernaut you know as Buzzfeed). While writing more than 3,000 articles and features, Ashley interviewed a long list of celebrities, including the stars of beloved films and TV shows like The Goonies, Clueless, Big Trouble in Little China, Animaniacs, Blossom, and Parks and Recreation, as well as professional athletes like Hines Ward, Joe Flacco, Brandon Marshall, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, and Royce Gracie, among many others.

Fresh out of college, Ashley’s first role was as managing editor for a now-defunct luxury lifestyle magazine, and soon after, in a role none of us would have imagined in a million years: editor-in-chief of a beauty pageant magazine. While he learned the ins and outs of magazine publishing, he built a fondness for fish out of water scenarios. He knows that crucial strengths are unflagging willingness to learn and constant adaptation, which he integrates into his college-level lectures.

As digital media changed again with new algorithms and less ad revenue, Ashley moved to the outdoors niche publisher Bonnier, where, at legacy magazine titles like Flying, Yachting, Scuba Diving, and Salt Water Sportsman, he overhauled and modernized countless digital publishing presences. His greatest accomplishment was breathing new life into and transforming the audience of digital travel platform Islands while becoming one of the most trusted and respected journalists in travel and lifestyle media.

Today, Ashley is a consultant to multiple niche digital media outlets, mentor to more than a dozen freelance journalists, and is the publisher and editor of The Golf Getaway.

TL;DR: the independent school insider. Blues musician. Academic coach. Writes movies. LA 

Rob Stone is an award-winning blues musician who has spent the last three decades touring and recording internationally and performing with musicians from B.B. King to Slash–and our own Michael Weisman. 

Rob holds a master's degree from Harvard University and a B.A. from Colorado College and has spent over 25 years guiding students to develop practical strategies to achieve their very best. He is our academic coaching and executive function sensei and history guru: his work as a writer often reflects passion for political and social history. He has lectured at universities, published scholarly articles, and written several film and television screenplays. 

Mindful of cognitive and social-emotional development, Rob spent 18 years as a classroom teacher in one of the country’s most prestigious private schools. He’s trained teachers, presented at national conferences, published articles in educational journals, and served on independent school admissions committees. Rob’s educational consultancy background runs deep: he helps families navigate a wide range of educational needs, including the application process for elite independent private high schools and gaining admission into the country's most competitive colleges.

TL;DR: Williams. Brown. Former Phillips Academy - Andover Faculty (mathematics). Investment Banker. Juilliard Admit (Euphonium!). Photographer. We’re lucky that he can’t stay away from teaching. NYC

Donald Kost is an investment banking professional with a heart of gold. He did his undergraduate work at  Williams College, where he earned degrees in Mathematics and Comparative Literature. Later, while pursuing his Master’s degree in Urban Education Policy at Brown University, he worked with Teach for America as a Special Education teacher. After meeting Elizabeth and joining the team at the time, he went on to teach Mathematics at Phillips Academy in Andover as their youngest full-time instructor. One of our all-time favorite pieces of trivia: he was also admitted to Juilliard as a euphonium player (but went to Williams instead). 

Naturally, Donnie also recently helmed educational technology start-ups across Singapore, Shanghai, and Seoul. Dedicated to learning as much as possible about business, he set out to break into the fast-paced environment of Wall Street finance, and he currently works in the Leveraged Finance arm of a Bulge Bracket Investment Bank. With his years of experience in education, Donald helps demystify the world of high finance and provides counsel on career paths to our students. If you’re extremely lucky, he can help you with math, too.

TL;DR: Mount Holyoke. New York Law School. Marathoner. Worked for Cuomo. First gen. Takes no prisoners. Equestrienne. Stamford.

Jennifer Murphy is a Government Law and Policy lawyer. After graduating with a B.A. in Critical Social Thought (Culture and Politics), she unapologetically meandered from jobs as a horse trainer and certified riding instructor, to paralegal and data management consultant before landing in law school in New York on the heels of the financial crisis. As economic activity declined in half of all countries in the world, the global financial panic inspired her to become an early associate of her school’s Financial Services Law Center and Co-Chair of the Center’s Speaker Forum. She was also a merit-appointed Teaching Assistant for a course on Mediation and Negotiation and President of the Dispute Resolution Team. She spent her summers interning for a federal district court judge and working in the compliance department of Citigroup.

Jennifer was the first female in her family to have attended college and the first of her family to attend professional school. She cut her teeth in government working for New York’s 56th Governor, analyzing and writing laws for one of the most diverse states in the country, providing legal advice and project management on a large scale, first-in-the-nation initiatives across a broad portfolio ranging from big data and agency internal control programs to criminal justice reform, post-incarceration reentry and volunteer legal assistance programs. She was counsel to the Joint Task Force on Employee Misclassification and Worker Exploitation and lead counsel on federal issues safeguarding New York state's policies and programs. Jennifer offers a unique perspective to our students with an eye on the law, as well as secondary knowledge as the consulting ear and spouse of a Big Law partner with decades of experience across the public and private sectors.

Fun facts: Jennifer ran the New York City marathon on her thirtieth birthday – finishing the 26.2 miles with a foot fracture endured around mile 19. Currently, she is reading a condensed Business School Book Challenge curriculum, and throughout the year can be found hosting parenting and adolescent development book club nights, running through the woods of Connecticut with her brood of children, or on the search for the horse that won’t irreparably break her at 40-something.