Engineer / STEM tutor

Collin E.

Hi! My name is Collin, and I recently completed my Master's Degree from UCLA in Structural/Earthquake Engineering. Before that, I completed my Bachelor's in Civil Engineering from UCLA as well (Go Bruins!). I have since started working as a Design Engineer in the field of Structural Engineering, and will soon be located in downtown Los Angeles.

I center my teaching around fundamentals and visualizations as much as possible. There's only so many problems and scenarios that are possible to go through in a lesson, and I've found that leaving my students with a "feel" for the material to go with worked examples has been most effective. Personally, I started to understand calculus much better when I could see what was happening, as opposed to just memorizing definitions. From these improvements in math, my physics improved dramatically, as the two are closely linked.

As for how this applies to my actual lessons, I like to create a set of notes throughout any tutoring session to leave behnd for the student. These notes will typically have detailed solutions to the problems at hand, and I make them to serve as study tools. Duing testing times, I typically make practice tests, with the aim of making them slightly harder than I would expect from any actual exam. I've found this to be effective, as it forces a student to really think through the questions, as opposed to falling back on memorized patterns.

Feel free to reach out with any questions! As I work full time, I will get back outside of standard business hours, and my availability is limited to weekends.