Tyler attended the University of Minnesota, where he later worked as an interactive technology grant-funded researcher for three years after graduation. While living in Asia for 12 years, he has worked at Prince of Songkla University in Thailand, helping non-native English-speaking professors publish abroad while teaching academic writing and citation courses. Meanwhile, he collaborated with startups in Shenzhen and Shanghai, working on college applications for eight years. To support his students, he explored creative nonfiction writing within courses at UCLA to gain an academic understanding of personal essays. He has mentored students to get accepted to top schools like Cornell, Penn, Columbia, JHU, Duke, Vanderbilt, Cambridge, Oxford, London Business School, Emory, Rice, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, USC, BU, Harvard, and The University of Chicago.