Achievable Awards 2026: An interview with Meeraj Patel

Every year, the Achievable Awards honor educators who are making a meaningful difference across their fields, ranging from independent tutoring and admissions counseling to classroom teaching. We’re proud to highlight Meeraj Patel, the 2026 winner of our Best Tutor award, who truly exemplifies this impact.

Meeraj Patel’s educational approach is characterized by a unique blend of in-depth subject knowledge across math, verbal, and writing, personalized mentorship, and a strong dedication to student growth. As the founder of Intuitive Test Prep, he is highly regarded in academic and standardized test coaching, achieving exceptional results for his students and helping them gain admission to their dream schools.

Tell us a little bit about your current role as a tutor. What areas do you specialize in?

I teach math, reading, grammar, logic, and essay writing, all geared toward exam prep. So I’m a subject matter generalist, you could say, but definitely a test prep specialist. I tutor for all sections of the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT. I guess my unique selling point is sheer efficiency: I drive pretty large score improvements, typically two to three times the industry norm, and usually in a third to a half as many hours of instruction.

My students still have to work and put in the time, but they don't have to spend two to four hours a week in sessions with me, for example. So, for students who don't have time to take a four-hour prep class every week, this is usually quite the competitive edge. A lot of my students come from districts with a really high degree of academic competitiveness, many from private schools or even very competitive public schools, so efficiency is usually a must.

How did you get started in your career/field? What drew you to education?

It’s been quite the meandering road! Totally unplanned, at first. In the beginning, it all started out with part-time gig work. I had plans to go into healthcare, and I was looking for part-time work to support myself while working through graduate school.

Early on, I was tutoring students part-time at libraries, cafes, and bookstores. I used to joke that Barnes & Noble Cafe was my office! At the same time, I served as an SAT instructor for a highly regarded test prep firm in New Jersey. Back then, most of the country had few options. You either went to Kaplan or the Princeton Review, and boutique test prep had yet to take off. Test prep as an industry didn't really exist, and tutoring as a profession wasn't regarded as such. AI was still the stuff of science fiction, so there were no AI tutors, either.

Where I worked was one of the few places people could go for something that didn't fit into the big test-prep models. What set them apart was their content-driven approach, rather than relying solely on “tips and tricks” like plugging in answers. They were actually teaching the skills, concepts, and fundamentals, so it was very different than other firms. In the beginning, I taught large classes of 15 to 20 students (sometimes up to 25 in the summer) and small workshops of five to 10 students. The company offered both large classes and one-on-one instruction, and over time, the demand for private tutoring with me grew. I began teaching private lessons, and after a year, there was a waitlist for my sessions. Eventually, I was asked to write an SAT math workbook for the company's instructors to use in the flagship course so that we could standardize results across instructors. It worked quite well: the average improvement in students' math scores after the course was between 200 and 250 points out of 800, which was quite large for just one section.

Funny enough, even though I started out as a Math instructor, I’m now probably most sought after for my Reading and Verbal strategies. My Reading strategies for the ACT Reading section and the GRE Verbal, in particular, are very popular with students, though I’m equally adept at teaching all the sections of each test I teach.

Who or what made the biggest impact on you during your educational and professional journey?

This question always reminds me of those acceptance speeches at award shows, the ones where people have to be nudged off the stage because of how long the list of thank-yous tends to run!

The short answer is that every teacher in high school and college, every boss I ever worked under, and every writer of every book I ever found helpful and enlightening probably did the same thing for me – something I try to do for my students – which is to show someone that what the so-called “geniuses” do (either naturally or by the benefit of someone’s instruction) CAN, in fact, be observed and learned and taught.

This mindset is EVERYTHING. It’s the source of all confidence once you believe it: the real kind, the kind you don’t have to fake. It’s really just about understanding the difference between talent and skill. Talent is born, after all, but skill can be taught, and standardized tests (thankfully) measure skill levels, not talent levels.

How would you describe your tutoring style, and how do you approach your work with your students?

This question can be broken down three ways, I suppose, depending on what you mean – by how I run my sessions, how I plan students’ tutoring programs, and how you’d describe what you could call my “teaching style”.

In terms of how I run my sessions, I’d describe my style as direct, informal, and very activity-oriented. I’m a big believer in learning by doing, so a typical session usually isn’t built around a formal lesson plan, but around helping the student learn from mistakes made on homework assignments, practice tests, guided practice drills with feedback loops, or all of these things.

In terms of how I structure a student’s tutoring program and game plan, my approach is to customize things and be very student-centered. While I use certain protocols – the kind you develop just from having done something thousands of times – to ensure that a student’s test prep is well-organized and carefully thought out, the details of HOW I map out each student’s journey are built around them.

In terms of my teaching style…I guess you could call it the equivalent of a writer’s unique “voice”, in the sense that every teacher probably has one – a certain way of explaining things, a certain rhythm – I’d have to say that…I definitely think in and teach in terms of frameworks. Decision-making frameworks, especially. That’s everything in test prep. Step-by-step processes. At the risk of sounding a tad reductive, everything I teach can be boiled down to “If you see X, do Y” type commands. I really do think that if you want to be great at anything, you have to spend lot of time thinking about process, and I think that’s just how my brain likes to express the details of process.

How do you respond when a student says, “I’m just bad at tests,” or “I’m just not good at this subject,” and how do you help them gain confidence?

I try to end this conversation quickly, to be honest – kindly, yes, but quickly. I get where they’re coming from, but it’s like saying someone who just started walking is bad at walking. Of course they are. To be uninitiated in the art of something is to be bad at it.

Bottom line: I don’t want the student to lose too much time wallowing in defeatism or self-pity. How to fix being uninitiated? You have to get initiated. Put in your time. Pay your dues. Learn the right way of doing things. Sometimes – actually, most of the time, come to think of it – unlearn the wrong way. Stop seeing it as a talent you ought to have and start seeing it as a skill you must build. To return to what we were talking about earlier, talent is born, while skill is made. And standardized exams, thankfully, measure skill, not talent.

What does “excellence in education” mean to you?

That’s a tough one. Obviously, it can mean a lot of things, but if pressed for an answer, I’d have to say that it means having a mastery of the fundamentals of whatever it is you’re doing.

Students sometimes get impatient when you try to make them build a foundation – they often want a shortcut or a hack or just to focus on the “advanced stuff”, as they put it. But it’s not just about building a foundation for whatever comes next, although it’s that too. It’s about building a confidence that enables you to handle things you haven’t seen before. To think for yourself without consulting an expert, or to decide what to do for yourself without having to keep asking permission.

This is so important because standardized exams like the SAT and the GRE keep themselves going by constantly creating variations and twists on classic patterns. Students with strong foundations can handle those. The rest keep asking me things like, “How do I handle this question type?” not realizing they’ve seen it before.

But mastery? TRUE mastery? That leads to an intuitive understanding of the concepts. The kind of intuition that lets you reach the highest level of performance, and it’s that kind of intuitive grasp I’m always trying to instill in students. Without it, they can’t find their way to top scores on these exams. That’s why I named my company “Intuitive Test Prep”.

What’s one piece of advice you always give your students?

Another tough one to answer! But perhaps given how much BAD advice there is out there, maybe the most useful bit of advice I can give here is how to recognize good advice.

It doesn’t look like a list of tips and tricks (my least favorite phrase, incidentally). It always presents more as a method or a process – basically, an organized system or framework of some sort. And there’s a rationale behind it. Something the tutor and student can both get behind so that they’re on the same page.

When somebody asks me for “tips and tricks”, I know straight away that they don’t really care about learning or excelling at whatever we’re talking about. They see it as a hurdle to be cleared on the way to better things, and they want to expend the least amount of time and energy possible.

I get where they’re coming from - and naturally, I try to make everything I do as clean and efficient as possible, but the way I know I’m talking to a future winner is that they ask not for tips and tricks but about the best approach. That’s how I know I’ve found my ideal student. That’s the sign of real dedication.


You can learn more about Meeraj on Achievable’s website or by visiting Intuitive Prep’s official website.