Chemical Engineer and Small Business Owner

Eric M.

I earned my bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Kansas State University in 2008, and I have spent the years since using that education daily rather than leaving it on a shelf. Since 2015 I have owned and operated Border Brewing Company, a craft brewery in the Crossroads Arts District of Kansas City, where fermentation science, reaction kinetics, pH control, and heat transfer are daily production problems rather than textbook abstractions. The brewery is one of several ventures I run as an entrepreneur, and that technical work keeps my chemistry and math current.

I want to tutor chemistry, algebra, and prealgebra, with a particular interest in students who have decided they are bad at science. That conclusion is almost never true. Most students who struggle in chemistry are not stuck on chemistry; they are stuck on the algebra underneath it, whether that is rearranging an equation, tracking units through a conversion, or keeping significant figures straight. I diagnose that first, because a student who cannot confidently solve for a variable will never feel confident with stoichiometry or gas laws no matter how many times the concept gets re-explained.

While at Kansas State I worked as a teaching assistant for a general chemistry lab, mostly underclassmen who were taking the course because their major required it and who never expected to use chemistry again. I loved that job, and it is the clearest reason I want to do this one. I did not fall in love with math and science for their own sake, and I was never the student who found equations beautiful on the page. What captured me was watching those skills do real work in the world. So when a student asks why any of this matters, I do not want to tell them it will be on the test. I want to show them something real that only works because someone got the math right, because that is the answer that made me care.