I'm a chemist and a career tutor. I hold an A.S. in Chemistry from South Puget Sound Community College and completed my coursework toward a B.S. in Chemistry at Saint Martin's University, where I received the Tetrahedron Award for outstanding academic performance in organic chemistry. I designed and ran my own independent research project in synthetic organic chemistry, wrote the funding proposal that paid for it, and had an abstract accepted for presentation at the American Chemical Society...
I'm a chemist and a career tutor. I hold an A.S. in Chemistry from South Puget Sound Community College and completed my coursework toward a B.S. in Chemistry at Saint Martin's University, where I received the Tetrahedron Award for outstanding academic performance in organic chemistry. I designed and ran my own independent research project in synthetic organic chemistry, wrote the funding proposal that paid for it, and had an abstract accepted for presentation at the American Chemical Society national meeting. That matters for tutoring because I don't only know the textbook version, I've spent a lot of time at a bench watching what happens when the textbook version doesn't work.
For two years I worked as an Instructional Technician at South Puget Sound Community College, where I reopened a tutoring center that had been closed and built it into the highest-traffic center on campus, logging roughly 2,000 individual student sessions over three quarters. Most of my students were college students in their first two years, though I worked with high school and Running Start students as well, and I taught in every format there is: one-on-one, small groups clustered around a shared assignment, and lecture-style review sessions before exams.
My approach is diagnostic. Most students struggling in chemistry don't need the whole chapter re-explained. They need someone to find the exact place where things stopped making sense, which is usually two or three concepts earlier than where they think the problem is. In general chemistry it's often stoichiometry or unit reasoning. In organic it's almost always that nobody ever made electron pushing feel like a rule rather than a memorization exercise.
I tutor introductory and general chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, and lower-division math. I'm patient, I won't make you feel stupid for asking. Chemistry is my favorite subject and I think it's beautiful and I hope that I can always remind students this is a real science and not just abstract questions on homework.
