Hi, I'm Priyanka Prasad! I'm a senior Mathematics and Economics major at Butler University. I have minors in Management Information Systems, Business Administration, and French. I've been a Math and Economics tutor throughout my time in college. These are subjects in which many students struggle during high school and college, and I find helping students to feel more confident in them to be so rewarding!In my spare time, I love to travel, learn new languages, cook, dance, and work with young people. I've done this as a freelance tutor for the past 4 years and also through mentorship opportunities through College Mentors for Kids and working as a tutor for refugees for a local school system.

Over the course of the past 4 years, I have tutored over 20 high school students for an extended period of time. Many of these tutoring experiences have been specifically for test preparation. During this time, I've greatly enjoyed helping students meet their own academic goals. Of all the types of tutoring I've done over the years, I've found test preparation tutoring to be the most rewarding. Here's why: standardized tests like the SAT and ACT are often high stakes: performance on one test can have quite a large impact on a student's life. Despite this, test taking is a skill many students struggle with. Fortunately, I've found that test taking skills can be taught, and that learning them can improve student's standardized test performance dramatically. It's enjoyable to watch students develop into confident, effective test takers. It's even better to see what doors doing well on essential tests can open for them.

I've also tutored 10-15 students as a supplement to in-class instruction for a specific course. Normally, I enjoy working with student on Math, Economics, Reading, and Writing. Most of the students I've tutored have seen an improvement of 2+ letter grades during the time we've worked together.

When I first meet a student, I make it a point to learn about the student's interests and goals, both academic and extracurricular. Then, when the student and I are discussing the subject I am teaching them, I help the student make connections between the subject I'm teaching them to something they have a personal interest in. For example, I was recently working with an Economics student who was doing poorly in the course because she believed it was irrelevant to her life aspirations and therefore didn't apply herself to it much. Soon, I learned that my student wanted desperately to become a corporate lawyer. Once I helped her see how economic principles serve as the basis for legal systems (on both a macro and micro level), she was far more interested in Economics. This interest enabled her to exceed her expectations for her course grade by over two letter grades.

As someone who has overcome my own personal struggles with lack of organization and timeliness, I have experienced firsthand what it feels like to work hard but still struggle to reach one's academic goals. Since I'm a far more organized and efficient student now than I was as a child (as evidenced by my solid college academic record), I've implemented changes in my study habits and lifestyle which truly worked. When I work with my students, I often share tips with them which worked for me to set them on the right path to academic success: This does two things: admitting that I'm not perfect either to a student takes me off a pedestal and allows me to connect with the student as their equal. Also, it provides the student motivation that they too, like me, can overcome their academic challenges.