My undergraduate degrees are in Psychology & Physics from San Francisco State University (Summa Cum Laude). My education in Psychology is not “clinical” (For example, being a therapist), rather it is research methods. This includes designing, planning and conducting experiments on topics such as learning and memory (For example, How does a learning strategy affect the amount of information one can remember?). My degree in Psychology also included many courses in statistics and data analysis. My education in Physics was initially aimed toward studying Space Physics in graduate school. During my senior year, I was introduced to a very renowned Psychologist and started working in his laboratory. That experience was so influential I focused my academic efforts almost exclusively on Psychology. For the purpose of evaluating me as a potential tutor, the pursuit of my Physics degree included 2 semesters of honors Physics, 4 semesters of Calculus and 2 semesters of Mathematical Statistics.
My Master's degree (with Distinction) is in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison , specifically Behavioral Neuroscience. For those not familiar with this terminology, it is the study of how our Biology (For example, hunger) affects our behavior (For example, attention span.) This phase of my education included coursework in Statistics, Neurobiology, Neuroscience, Neurophysiology, Psychophysiology, Medical Physics, and, of course, many areas in Psychology (For example, Motivation, Learning & Memory, Social Dynamics, Personality). Again, my education and interest is not “clinical”, but rather it is in information processing in the human brain. I used brain imaging techniques to study how different types of people process emotional information.
During graduate school, I was a Teaching Assistant and Instructor for numerous courses. Some of this work involved presenting lectures to large classes, much of this work involved teaching discussion sections to much smaller groups of students. One of the courses I taught 4 times was Experimental Psychology. The significance of teaching this course for tutoring is that this course satisfied the university requirement for a writing-intensive course. Thus, I have a lot of experience teaching students how to write focused, well-composed papers. Throughout graduate school I tutored for university programs aimed at any “walk-in” student, as well as those with special learning needs.
Lastly, let me briefly describe my approach to teaching. Obviously, teaching a large lecture class is very different than one-on-one tutoring, but there is much in common. First, and perhaps most important, is my “posture.” What I mean by that is, while I am the teacher and you are the student, we are both people and both deserve respect. The classroom or tutoring session is not the place for me to impress you by what I know. It is the place for me to help you develop good study habits, help you to realize a topic which seems difficult can be conquered with the right learning strategies, and help you to master a subject.