Margaret

Certified Tutor

I graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in Psychology as well as a minor in Primate Biology and a minor in Spanish. While at Duke, I interned with several psychology labs on campus as well as with Johns Hopkins Kennedy Krieger Institute. Additionally in undergraduate, I lived and studied abroad in La Pa, Bolivia. While there, I worked for six months in a Bolivian mental hospital, which helped expand my Spanish fluency, particularly in medical situations. For graduate school, I attended The University of Alabama at Birmingham where I pursued a doctorate in developmental psychology with an emphasis on autism intervention therapies. While I left the university to pursue a different career, I was still involved in teaching college level Abnormal Psychology and extensive field work with local autism centers in the city.

During graduate school, I was taking recreational, non-credit classes at the University of Alabama in Medical Spanish and began volunteering in a clinic in Pelham, AL, as an interpreter. I enjoyed that work so much that I left graduate school and returned to the Durham, NC area. There, I enrolled in the Spanish community facilitator and medical interpreting program at Durham Technical Community College. I completed my certificate in that program, and I have shadowed interpreters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University hospitals. I also interned in two Raleigh area clinics as a volunteer interpreter, Alliance Medical Ministries and Urban Ministries of Raleigh.

During my summers off from interpreting school, I worked as a summer studies instructor for Duke University's Talent Identification Program. I taught a class that was a mix of Introductory Psychology and Abnormal Psychology (essentially a 200-level college class) to gifted rising eighth and ninth graders who had scored highly enough on their Scholastic Achievement Tests to qualify for Duke's program. There I worked with them not just on learning the material but on how to write and research college-level research papers and how to prepare college level debates and power point presentations.

Moreover, I have been tutoring informally for about thirteen years. I started back in high school by tutoring for my younger sister's friends. My main areas have been Spanish, English Grammar and Composition, Psychology, and college application essays. I have also done some SAT Verbal tutoring as well. I am proficient tutoring the Verbal and Writing aspects of the SAT and ACT exams.

I love working with kids, whether they are those with special needs or learning disabilities like ADD, and I love the subjects that I teach, including Spanish, English, and Psychology, as they are all very dear to me.