TUTOR in person or online: math physics chem essays SAT ACT GRE MCAT (Peninsula or East Bay)
offered in person
offered virtually
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My educational background: I have a PhD in chemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder and am a postdoc at the nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley. My undergraduate degrees are in math and chemistry (and the coursework for a physics minor). I have tutored middle school, high school, and college students since 2004. At the CU, I have TAed and done content development for advanced chemistry classes.
A unique advantage I have as a tutor is that I was a terrible student in high school and college. One of my graduate professors let it slip when I started grad school that I held the lowest undergraduate GPA ever admitted to the program. Why would you want a former failure as a tutor? Because I know how failure happens. I know the study habits to avoid, and which "helpful" crutches teachers offer are actually traps. I also realized that the way subjects are taught in school is often ineffective and unnecessarily confusing, and I re-taught many of them to myself. Because of this experience, I can guide my students to learn and study effectively the first time around.
Academic topics I tutor include:
Chemistry (general chemistry, organic chemistry, upper division, e.g. analytical chemistry)
Math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus 1-3, linear algebra, differential equations, statistics)
Physics
My style is to first make sure my students have a full conceptual understanding of the subject material before helping them gain facility working through specific problems. If time allows and my students are interested, I like to move them ahead of their classes and expand on the class topics to build deeper understanding or relate the material to real life. Students who have interest in STEM often find me particularly useful as I can show them how the topics all fit together in the "big picture," or examples from my life as a working scientist. With some advanced students I have also just taught them advanced math and science concepts they find interesting but were not available in school.
High school test-prep and applications tutoring: I started teaching SAT and ACT for a national test-prep company before starting my own business. I have 20 years of experience with these tests. In addition, I help students with their college admissions essays from content planning to sentence-level edits.
College test-prep tutoring: I cover content knowledge and strategy for the physics, gen chem, and organic chemistry portions of the MCAT. As time and scheduling allows, I emphasize a dual-study approach whereby students study for their classes while simultaneously extracting MCAT-relevant topics and concepts for later review. In addition, one of my best friends is a physician who has helped me develop MCAT-style questions to help students practice the strategies I teach.
Applying to grad school? Having successfully navigated the application process myself, I can help with admissions essays and GRE also.
My fee is $100/hour for academic tutoring and writing coaching, $150 for test prep. I can take cash, Venmo, or Paypal.
Most of my availability is on the weekends as the commute to Berkeley takes up a lot of my evening, but if we plan ahead I should be able to do some weekdays as well. I am happy to come to the house or a cafe, or meet online, whichever is your preference.