USMLE Pro was founded by Alyssa Ehrlich, a then 4th-year medical student at Harvard Medical School, who used active learning techniques and a focus on test-taking strategy to excel on the USMLE, scoring a 262 on Step 1 and a 281 on Step 2 CK. After over 400 hours of independent tutoring experience, Alyssa decided to create her own company as a response to the problems she perceived with existing medical tutoring companies. USMLE Pro was created to offer an alternative to other companies that seemed to underpay tutors and make almost no effort to guide tutors or ensure high-quality teaching.

When working for another prominent medical tutoring company, Alyssa was shocked to discover that they did very little to evaluate her teaching skills prior to hiring her, and provided almost no oversight or guidance to help ensure that students were succeeding. Talking to other tutors across various companies, it was clear that this was a systemic problem among existing tutoring companies and that there had to be a better way to help students looking for help on these career-determining exams. Alyssa selected a team of high-scoring and highly-experienced tutors and taught them the USMLE Pro Method, a unified set of guidelines for optimizing USMLE, shelf exam, and medical coursework tutoring that takes advantage of evidence-based principles of adult learning to help students study more efficiently and achieve higher scores. Having benefited from need-based financial aid herself, Alyssa wanted to pay it forward and help level the playing field by offering need-based pricing through USMLE Pro, the first program of its kind among medical tutoring companies. Students had amazing results, told their friends and classmates, and soon USMLE Pro had grown from two tutors to over twenty (and counting).

Currently, USMLE Pro is the only women-owned and operated prominent medical education company in the USMLE tutoring space. All members of our core leadership team identify as female, including 

• Alyssa Ehrlich, Founder and CEO

• Shanna Salazar, Student Success Specialist