Episode 295 | Rhea Wanchoo | M&W Education | The EdisonOS Podcast

Episode Description

In this episode, Rhea Wanchoo, co-founder of M&W Education and UC Berkeley neuroscience student serving 20-30 test prep students annually, reveals her psychology-backed approach including the "serial position effect"—teaching students to read first and last sentences of passages to leverage how we remember beginnings and endings better than middles—and "sentence diagramming" exercises where students identify parts of speech despite many not even knowing what prepositions are. She discusses her "sunflower method" for essay brainstorming where prompts are the center and ideas branch out as petals students can "pluck off," and explains yield protection—why she was waitlisted at Virginia Tech but accepted to Harvard and Berkeley, as less selective schools sometimes reject overqualified applicants they assume won't enroll. Rhea shares her "whiteout test" for scholarship essays: if you can substitute any college name, it's not specific enough.