Brendan

Certified Tutor

I have worked as a teaching assistant and tutor for two general chemistry courses and a microeconomics course and will be a TA for Engineering Computing (a course in Matlab) this coming spring. For Chemistry, I led two, 75 minute workshops per week with a small group of students whom I helped to complete a problem set. For economics, I held 3 hours of office hours per week where students in the course would come in with questions on weekly homework assignments or exams. I have learned chemistry and computer science from different perspectives having taken AP Chemistry and AP Computer Science in high school and taking comparable classes again in my freshman year of college. In the workshop sessions I conducted as a chemistry TA, I would work through simple representative examples to help my students grasp general concepts, and then guide then through specific problems. My ability to illustrate the underlying concepts behind problems using different examples is very effective in garnering deeper understanding in those I tutor. I'm also good at asking questions geared to test whether a student really understands the concepts or not, and at explaining seemingly complex ideas in simple terms.