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Brent Durbin

Brent Durbin: GMAT Tutor in San Francisco
Brent Durbin
San Francisco, California
Brent Durbin is a holdover from a bygone era – back when the CAT format was a mere gleam in the GMAC’s eye and the GMAT was administered in stuffy elementary schools on pint-sized desks. After sweating through the last paper-and-pencil GMAT ever given, Brent chose to forgo B-School and instead enrolled at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Two years and many problem sets later, he set off for DC and joined the sausage factory of government as press secretary for a U.S. Senator. Working on the Hill was a pleasure in every way -- the lovely weather (100% wool + 95% humidity = 195% misery), the generous schedule (home before 10 at least once a week), and that civil, bipartisan atmosphere Congress is known for.

Despite these pleasures, in 2001 Brent traded his power broker pinstripes for the streets of Manhattan and a new gig tutoring the GMAT (and, initially, the GRE and LSAT, with 99th percentile scores on each – including a 790 GMAT). With Brent’s first GMAT students now graduating from the likes of NYU and Yale, he looks forward to a lifetime of early tee times and solid investment advice. During his tenure in New York, Brent also volunteered for Junior Achievement, teaching economics and business skills to seniors in the city’s public schools.

Now relocated to the Bay Area, Brent continues his tutoring for Manhattan GMAT while pursuing his Ph.D. in Political Science at UC Berkeley. His current research centers on foreign policy organizations, with a particular focus on the U.S. intelligence community. But what really drew Brent back to graduate school was his love of teaching, and it shows in the response he gets from students: in his most recent sections as an instructor for “Introduction to American Politics,” Brent earned an average rating of 6.4 out of 7 from his 50 students.

Brent’s return to the West Coast was a bit of a homecoming, since he was born in SoCal and grew up in Seattle. After a year at the University of Washington, he headed eastward and graduated magna cum laude from Oberlin College in Ohio. An avid soccer player and fan, Brent started three years on Oberlin’s varsity team, and has traveled as far as South Korea to watch the “beautiful game.” He also enjoys music of all sorts and has visited 48 states and more than 20 countries.

Feedback From Brent's Recent Students

“Brent has a very practical approach to teaching the concepts and he always does an excellent job of relating them back to the overall GMAT exam. Brent did an excellent job of always helping us to look at concepts and problems from different angles to illustrate a simpler approach.”

“Brent was great; he is clearly an expert on the GMAT and was incredibly knowledgeable about all of the areas and question types. He was particularly good at teaching the best way to approach a problem and explaining why all of the choices were wrong or right. He also presented ways in which simples questions could be made more difficult.”


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