Specializing in high school and college math, M.Sc. in Math

Evgeniya L.

I finished a bachelor in math at California State University Northridge and went to graduate school in math in Germany. While being a bachelor student, I volunteered in a math lab organized to provide help to students taking lower division college classes (calculus, linear algebra, etc). I also tutored a freshman high school student to help them to get into a specialized math program for high school students. In my graduate program, I was a teaching assistant for a short summer school course for graduate students. I also participated in numerous graduate reading seminars (and was part of their organization for some of them) in which students were explaining the material to students. My experience gives me an understanding of the learning processes and allows me to appreciate how these might differ from person to person.

I am attentive to my students' needs and try to figure out a personalized approach that works best for them. A lot of times, the student might not be understanding the current material because they have some knowledge gaps in the previous material. So I would try to quickly identify any existing gaps and alleviate them. I also understand that a sense of achievement is important to maintain motivation for learning, so I make sure to carefully pick the exercises that help the student grow and feel satisfaction from mastering the material. If I can, I also try to make the exercises more fun by making them relevant to student’s other interests.

Mathematics is not about learning formulas; it’s about learning to think and becoming confident and independent in that thinking. In my personal experience, at any level of learning math, we progress much faster if we have someone to bounce our ideas at. So in some sense, this is what I am for. I love math and I want to inspire my students to love it too!