I bring an engineer's enthusiasm for real-life applications of STEM topics to my tutoring approach because I've found that people of all ages learn best when they see how a topic will be relevant in their own lives. These subject areas are called the "hard" sciences, but I have found that they are only hard when poorly taught. My approach to tutoring is to help students discover what they already know about a subject, or want to know, and use that as the bridge to the course material.

Throughout my undergraduate degree I tutored friends and family in everything from high school physics to remedial college algebra to my various engineering classes. I went on to graduate Summa Cum Laude and spent a year between my undergraduate and graduate degrees working as a substitute teacher for K-6 students. One particularly rewarding experience from this time was when I was assigned to be a dedicated math aid for a third grader who was struggling to learn division. The student was elated when I helped him get caught up with the rest of the class. The experience of lagging behind one's peers or the teacher's pace can be stressful and dispiriting at any education level, and even just an hour of effective tutoring can help immensely in diminishing that distance.

While getting my Masters and PhD at UC Berkeley, I frequently worked as a graduate student instructor, which involved holding office hours and tutoring students in biothermodynamics, control systems, and dynamics, among other subjects. After graduating I joined the faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology for three years in a unique role of being a professor who tutored deaf and hard of hearing engineering and technology students in any of their STEM courses, including technical writing. These students were attending engineering/tech courses and following along with a sign language interpreter, but many key concepts were lost in translation, so I was their all-purpose engineering professor-tutor to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.