What is your teaching philosophy?

Activity. I learn best by doing, and always like to provide this learning option to students as much as possible, whether that means working through homework together, real-world demonstrations or independent projects and assignments fueled by a student's own curiosity.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

The key to fostering independent learning is to help students discover how to required material relates to their own interests. Unfortunately, even at the undergraduate level, most introductory courses do not cover all the details of a subject, or how it is used by people in the real world. As a student, my most product and meaningful learning has come from exploring these avenues independently. This is how I learned much of differential calculus as a high school freshman and how I am learning Python and bioinformatics right now. As a tutor, one of my first priorities is to figure out the things about a particular subject that a student finds most interesting so that I can focus our tutoring sessions around those topics, and present avenues for independent study.

What might you do in a typical first session with a student?

The first step in any relationship is getting to know one another. In addition to learning more about a student, their passions and problem areas, I also want the students I tutor to have a good sense of who I am and how I teach. That means jumping head first into the material, working through it together, but with an emphasis on independence and dialogue. I want to see how well a student understands the material currently, and which areas we can develop further.