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Learn More About Anne's Experience:

ACT The first thing previous students have asked me when I tutored them on the ACT was "what was YOUR test score?" which is a valid question, and perhaps a good indication of how well I would teach the test, but not the only indication. So we'll get that out of the way first. I got a 30 composite score on the test, with a 33 on the english section and a 26 on the Math (not a good day for math apparently), and received a 32 on the science reasoning section. Now, having that first question out of the way, anyone can be a decent test taker, anyone can be a poor test taker, the key to doing better is figuring out how to get over test anxieties, and this is what I helped students do when I tutored high school students in Hawaii. I had one little girl who went from her first time having an anxiety attack and being unable to finish the test, to scoring a 25 (not spectacular, but a great improvement) after a few months of tutoring. The problem I found was parents were telling these kids that the tests were going to make or break the rest of their lives, which is simply not true. If you do bad, retake it! Use that bad test as a way to study for the new one! Simply having someone there to let them know you can study, and people have done better was enough to make these kids improve, and I want to have the opportunity to help more children realize that they can do better, and the test makers aren't out to get them. I think I can help put them at ease, perhaps a much more important thing to be able to learn than any one particular math or vocabulary skill. astronomy My experiences with astronomy are actually quite diverse, the most obvious one being that I have my undergraduate degree in astronomy and am currently pursuing my graduate degrees in Space Studies. While I was living in Hawaii pursuing my degree I took classes ranging from planetary geology to classical mechanics, instrumentation and techniques, and even a class on protostellar formation by the leader in the field, Bo Reipurth. Beyond just normal classroom activities, I also have quite a bit of astronomical experience outside the classroom. I worked on Mauna Kea all four years of my undergraduate degree, at the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy, where my job was to explain difficult astronomical concepts to lay-persons. I also volunteered at Imiloa, which was our planetarium, where we quite often gave informational lectures about the science going on at the summit of Mauna Kea. Many times during those lectures I wasn't talking about science merely done by people I knew, I was talking about my own research. I've done quite a bit of obvserving (upwards of 35 nights) on the universities 24 inch telescope, and had the opportunity to work with data from the Keck telescope, the Subaru telescope, and even from the Hubble Space telescope. My forte then is certainly observational astronomy, but I've done a fair bit of computational physics, I spent four years explaining cosmology, and I give a darn good star show! GRE First Question I'm sure a potential student would ask is "Anne, what did you score on your GRE?" I score a 1450, 700 on math, 750 on english, with no test preparation. Big mistake, I will be the first to admit that. The semester after I took my test I helped my friends prepare for their's (I had tutored ACT and SAT for the local high school, so I had a general idea what to do) and what struck me was that the GRE was so ridiculously similar, and all the same study tactics were working. I helped my friends study for the test after they got poor scores their first times around, and a few of them jumped up to 300 test points! Of course I got curious and took a practice test, and just from helping them, my "natural test taking ability" took me from a pretty good score, to a close to perfect score. It is possible to study for these tests, and it's certainly easier to do it in a friendly environment than it is with a parent who is frustrated and feels like their childs entire future is riding on this one test. It isn't! Grad schools don't care how many times you take it, they care how good it gets! I've demonstrated that I can help people improve their test scores, and certainly that I know the subject knowledge. I welcome the challenge to help people do better on a test that for so long has unnecessarily frightened so many people. softball I played varsity softball all four years of high school, most of that time spent as a catcher or shortstop. That being said, for a few weeks I filled in as pitcher because our pitcher was injured and until high school, pitcher was my main position, so I consider myself a utility player. When I got to college, I played on the college team off and on (it was difficult while trying to obtain two degrees), but have not stopped playing at some level ever since. I think I would make an excellent hitting instructor or pitching/catching instructor if there were two girls who were planning on working together. In high school I was on traveling teams that never failed to make it to national tournaments, so I'm very familiar with very competitive play, and actually took pitching and catching lessons from players from Tampa Bay's professional team!