Ron Purewal has always been enthralled by standardized tests. In his elementary-school days, he never liked state-sponsored aptitude testing, because it always ended too soon; even today, he can be found loitering in the Study Aids section of Barnes & Noble, perusing everything from the curricula of second-language English proficiency tests to the weird dice that populate spatial reasoning exams.

He is an inveterate strategist, approaching every quandary in life – whether it be the GMAT, a sequence of Tetris pieces, or a decision about when to go to sleep or which lane is best in a traffic jam – with an absolute dedication to finding optimal solutions and explaining them, in detail, to whomever is fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be listening. He is also an unconventional and flexible thinker, known for questioning dogma – whether that be the ‘established’ solution to a math problem or the ‘acceptable’ yet essentially arbitrary pairing of food items like cereal and milk – and for evaluating courses of action solely on their effectiveness. Ron brings these traits – an unflinching commitment to solving problems, and a remarkable diversity of approaches to finding those solutions – to Manhattan GMAT, where he is a natural choice to teach its 9-session course and private lessons.

Ron has taught students of all ages in almost every imaginable subject area, from AP calculus and physics to technical writing and human nutrition. He has taught standardized test prep for over a decade, and has written and edited major test-prep companies’ curriculum materials. He will be teaching MGMAT’s 9-session course in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has lived since graduating from Stanford with honors degrees in mathematics and chemistry in ‘99.