Franklin Yard Q+A: Guilherme Lima

The Phillips Academy Senior, who scored a 1550 on the SAT, sits down for a Q+A with Sam Bellows, his tutor at Franklin Yard.

Alright, favorite ice cream flavor?

Coffee, coffee, coffee.

With the whole pieces? The beans?

No, no.

Worst ice cream?

This isn't the worst, but I think caramel ice cream is very overrated. It just gets old really quick.

So you were born and raised in Brazil and are studying at Phillips [Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts]. Can you give the backstory on how you ended up there?

The story is kind of fun. I've actually never told the true story to anyone at Philips. Initially I was just going spend one year in the States as like a kind of exchange program. And it was going to be temporary: basically coming here for 10th grade before the IB program starts in Brazil. So once I decided that I now needed to figure out where to go, so I just kind of googled, like, “best schools in the US.” And I started discovering boarding schools, which was not a concept I was really familiar with. I ended up applying to Phillips and I got in.

But my parents thought it was only going be a year, and that was the plan, but I in the back of my brain I had like a sneaking suspicion that I wanted to stay. So that was a really hard conversation, telling them that I wanted to stay. They were like “that is not what we signed up for at all” [laughs]. But after a year here, I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea of going back to school in Brazil.

Alright, pivoting to the SAT: you’ve recently wrapped up the process and ended up with a 1550 superscore. Which is amazing. From your perspective, how did you manage to get there?

I think it's a couple of things. First, it's familiarizing yourself with the test. Everyone's first attempt is not going to be their best score. The first time, you don't know what you're getting yourself into. That's completely understandable. Also, the SAT is a very difficult test. At least for me, I hadn't taken any standardized tests before, so I had to get used to it. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is understanding that it’s a mental test, too. A mental challenge. You have to be locked in. You have to be paying attention [while you’re testing] because you're not going to have time to go back and double check all your questions. So you have to be on point. You have to be paying extremely close attention to everything.

Also, probably my number one advice is to a good night's sleep before the test [laughs]. Actually eat breakfast, you know? Drink water.

Do you feel like improving on the verbal side of the test was a lot different than the process of improving on the math side?

Oh, absolutely. Improving the Reading score is hard. When you get to a certain point, there aren’t really obvious or concrete steps that you take to easily increase your Reading score. With Math, you can go over basically everything that's going to be on the test. All the content. You just can't do that for reading, you know? Because it's a lot of interpretation, and it's just really hard to prepare for that. Now, it’s not like you can’t get better—you definitely can. The more tests you take, the more you're going to be prepared. But there is still a small element of luck: are you going to get texts that click with you? Or are you going to get these random scientific texts about, like, some fish in the Atlantic Ocean? Some passages are rough.

The Writing and Language section is different though—you can prepare for it by getting familiar with all the grammar rules. And that wasn’t too challenging.

What was the process of working with a tutor like?

It was really helpful for a couple reasons. One big thing was that I felt like you really understood College Board—like, how the test was made. And there’s a lot of like strategies that I got from that that were really helpful. I remember when we first started having lessons: I used to read a whole Reading passage first and then go to the answers. And then you told me that I should try reading the first question and then reading the text, because the questions are all in chronological order. And I wouldn’t have thought of that stuff, but tutors like you understand those tricks and tips.

The second part: it's helpful to have people explain stuff to you. In Math, for example, if I get something wrong and then I just find solutions on the internet or like how to do it right, that normally doesn't help that much; I need someone to explain their thought process to me. And obviously that doesn’t just apply to Math; explaining your thought process on a certain answer in the Reading section, that's really helpful, too. So I would say that working with a tutor is definitely a big advantage.

Last question: you're actually part of this fairly small group of people who have taken both the digital SAT and the paper-and-pencil version, because you tested in the States and Brazil. What was your experience like with the digital SAT and how did you think it compared to the classic version?

It's different. At the beginning [of this conversation] I mentioned how familiarizing yourself with the test is an important step. That was a challenge for me because I went into the digital test having only taken one practice test. So when I got into my first digital exam I was like: wow, this feels really different from what I’m used to. I struggled with timing because I ended up using Desmos [note: the built in graphing for the digital SAT] for probably too many questions. If I was taking it a second time I would have corrected it, but I didn’t know at the time.

It was a privilege to work with Guilherme, and we’re incredibly proud of his accomplishments. If your child needs support on the SAT or ACT, please reach out for your free consultation.