about me

 
 

Strengths

  • Relaxed environment in which students can feel comfortable pushing their boundaries of learning and problem solving without feeling judged

  • An effective motivator, helping students want to put in the time and effort to succeed

  • Knows the test inside and out, including both content and effective problem solving strategies

  • Establishes open, honest, and frequent communication among the student, parents/guardians, and himself to ensure that everyone is always on the same page

  • Works well with a variety of learners, with a particular specialty with ADHD students

hi! I’m Nick Floyd.

I like raising SAT scores. I like raising SAT scores so much that it’s been my full-time career for a decade. I received a perfect 1600 score on my SAT in high school, and started tutoring my peers right away. In 2010, I joined (excellent!) local tutoring company Wise Owl Tutoring in Orlando, FL. 2 years before graduating with a BA from UCF, I started my own test prep business and have been at it full time since then, with 12 years and over 10,000 hours of experience working with hundreds of students one-on-one to reach their score goals.

I have a passion for problem-solving. The SAT is designed to make students feel stupid and ill-equipped, and one of my favorite things is helping students to see that, despite what school and test experiences they’ve had, they are very smart and they already have far more problem-solving tools at their disposal than they think they do. In more recent years, I’ve come to see the role of SAT tutor is just as much coach as it is teacher. No matter what content material we learn in-session, it is crucial that a student practices the “doing” part of the test copiously with an improvement mindset. I consider connecting with and motivating students to set a clear goal and then put in the work to achieve it a specialty of mine. As a more particular specialty, I work very well with ADHD learners! Of course, I also have an encyclopedic knowledge of the SAT’s content and methods, and a talent for explaining them in clear, memorable lessons. I have been through every prep book I could get my hands on, and many, many more on education and learning theory. I eat, sleep, and breathe this test. If you can find another person who is more unreasonably, singularly obsessed with raising SAT scores, I would very much like to meet them.

To share a little more about me personally, I had a passion for math and band in high school. In college I bounced around majors from physics, to brass performance, to music composition before settling on a BA in Music when I realized that SAT tutoring was what I wanted to be doing full-time. I established my own in-person test prep company Top Performance Tutoring in Ocala, FL, and took up Skype tutoring under the name Nick Floyd Test Prep after moving to my current residence in Denver, CO. In Denver I enjoy reading (outside whenever possible!), board games, hiking in the mountains, and playing the euphonium.