Erik Kolb

Erik is a broadly experienced, highly sought-after tutor who works with students in person in the greater Washington, D.C. area and globally online. Born in Norway, he spent much of his childhood in Cameroon, Sweden, and Côte d’Ivoire. Erik’s experience in education started in college, when he tutored the children of West African refugee families living in the Chicago area and volunteered in a weekly program teaching the GED to inmates at Chicago’s Cook County Jail. While on summer breaks from college, Erik served as an Assistant Facilitator at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, VA, teaching children of diplomats about security at U.S. embassies abroad. He also taught at at the Huntington Learning Center, was the High School Program Director for the Foreign Service Youth Foundation, and was the teaching assistant for several undergraduate courses while in graduate school. Although he decided to pursue tutoring full-time, Erik is still very knowledgeable about ancient history and in particular the history of Roman Egypt. Among other skills he acquired in graduate school, Erik is a trained papyrus conservator and can read or speak ten different languages. Students are often thrilled to see their names written in languages they have never heard of, such as Coptic or Syriac.

Before joining Noodle Pros, Erik taught a wide variety of subjects both in the classroom and one-on-one for a nationally-recognized test prep company from 2005 to 2018. He has worked with thousands of students of all ages and score levels and has helped them to meet and often exceed their score goals. He is demanding, but very personable – his goal when working with students is always first and foremost to help them to be prepared, confident, and ready to meet any testing challenge they may face. Moreover, Erik’s deep knowledge of undergraduate and graduate admissions makes him an outstanding resource for students who need help with their application process, whether it’s choosing the right school or crafting the perfect essay.

Erik is a published author who has written academic history articles as well as content and practice questions for test prep publications. Among other projects, he contributed significantly to books on the SAT, the SAT and AP World History exams, the SAT and AP U.S. History exams, and the social studies portions of the TASC and GED exams.

In his spare time, Erik loves to eat adventurously and travel to new places. Students love to hear his stories about eating fruit that (some say) tastes like raw sewage in southeast Asia, navigating the varieties of wild game for sale in the marketplaces of east Africa, spending the night in the Sahara desert, and climbing ancient jungle temples in Central America. To date, he has been to 78 countries and is slowly working on the rest.