Elizabeth: Greenburgh tutor

Certified Tutor

I am excited when I teach because I believe every student has ample talent whether traditional schools have unlocked it or not.

I recently graduated from MIT with a bachelors of science in chemistry and biology and will be going to Columbia to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience this coming fall. I decided to try for my Ph.D. because I care deeply about decreasing the suffering so much of the population experiences due to mental health problems. I pursued this passion outside of academia as well by training as a crisis counselor while in undergrad for Crisis Text Line. The skills I learned as a crisis counselor helped me in a variety of social situations and I believe will also improve my tutoring abilities because tutoring goes well beyond just knowing the material well.

Throughout my life, I have found opportunities to be a tutor. As a high schooler, I tutored a variety of my peers. All the students I tutored improved their grades during our time working together. In one stand out case, I worked with a girl in both science and math for two years. When we started she had mainly Cs and below. We worked together to bring her grades up to a B average! The most exciting part of working with her (aside from getting to play with her adorable hedgehog) is that after we stopped working together she choose to push herself and take Advanced Placement classes and went on to get into a four-year college! She is currently thriving in college :)

I also tutored MIT undergraduates in chemistry and developed a college level chemistry curriculum for underprivileged high school students in Boston within the program BoSTEM. I enjoyed being able to help students through such a rigorous curriculum at MIT and using experiments to teach chemistry. I only wish I had more time to dedicate to tutoring while I was in undergrad.

I hope to find the teaching style that works best for you. When I developed a college level chemistry curriculum for BoSTEM we used a flipped classroom set up where kids watched educational videos at home and we applied their knowledge in the classroom with a variety of fun experiments. My favorite experiment was calculating the number of calories in a bag of Cheetos simply by burning one Cheetos under a can of water and testing the heat change of the water.

Every student has a different type of learning they work best with. I personally do the best when I make myself study guides of the material I've learned in lecture. I hope to work with you to find your own style. Finding your preference will benefit you for years to come.