Jon Kopita

Jon Kopita has been a New York City-based tutor, educational consultant, college applications adviser, and coach for the past 30 years, working with students, parents, and young adults in the New York metropolitan area, New England, the Bahamas, Korea, and Europe. His students have attended both private and public schools and also various New England boarding schools. 

Born in Ohio, Jon grew up around the country, attending three grade schools and three high schools due to his father’s work. He graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and a concentration in Physics. His first job out of college was a sales position with a large chemical company, but he soon left the corporate world for a life of teaching in New York City, his home since 1989. 

Jon’s approach to teaching has always been holistic, focusing on a student’s entire learning profile while tailoring lessons to individual needs and learning styles and often working with students over multiple years to address multiple facets of their education. He has taught all levels of middle school and high school math, chemistry, and physics. His greatest passion is to inspire his students by making these subjects understandable and relatable to their lives, always trying to satisfy the question “why do I need to learn this particular thing?” In addition to tending to his students, he understands and appreciates the need to balance parental expectations and to keep parents connected with their children's progress as an integral part of their learning team. 

To foster wider community outreach, Jon established a scholarship fund in the early 90’s at Cornell University Summer College. Its goal has been to identify economically disadvantaged high school students who have excelled within their New York City high schools and to give these kids the opportunity to study at Cornell during the summer for either three weeks or six weeks, all with the hope of creating better college awareness and broader opportunities for college admissions. Funds are raised through a combination of donations from Jon’s business and solicitation of corporations and private families. 

Jon loves the flexibility that teaching, advising, and coaching has brought over the years. He has traveled to 66 countries and hopes to reach 100. Two of his favorite places have been Laos and Namibia. If Jon finds an obscure place in the world, it means he has to go there. While not teaching and traveling, he tends to his property and house in NW Connecticut and produces art that he hopes to show publicly in the near future. He resides in Greenwich Village.