Clark Zhang Tutoring

Introduction: I'm a second-year medical student at Stanford School of Medicine. I graduated magna cum laude and with election to Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University. I'm interested in tutoring middle school, high school, and college students in a variety of subjects, including English, history, languages (Spanish and Mandarin Chinese), math, and science (including physics, chemistry, and biology). I'm also interested in helping students develop study skills. I will first discuss my qualifications for tutoring the subjects I mentioned above. Please see my subject description for study skills to learn more about my qualifications and approach for helping students develop study skills. My qualifications for specific subjects are the following: (1) I have over 300 hours of tutoring experience. I've tutored middle school, high school, college, and post-college students in most of the subjects for which I'm listed, as well as for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). I've helped students raise their class grades by one letter grade or more and their MCAT scores by one standard deviation or more (e.g., 18 to 30 or 30 to 36). (2) I'm also qualified to tutor natural sciences at both the college and pre-college levels because I excelled in physics, chemistry, and biology in both high school and college, where I studied these subjects as pre-medical biology major (I will also be teaching classes on the MCAT for Princeton Review later this year). I'm qualified to tutor history at the high school level and economics at the introductory college level for two reasons. First, I excelled in my world and US history classes at my high school, which was very intellectually rigorous. My high school was Hunter College High School, a New York City public high school that's one of the top schools in the country, with 30%-40% admission to Ivy League and other top schools like Stanford, MIT, Amherst, and Swarthmore. Second, in college I maintained a straight A average in macroeconomics, microeconomics, and econometrics, the core requirements for an economics major, which I considered getting. Lastly, I'm qualified to tutor humanities subjects like literature, art history, music history, and Spanish at the high school level because I excelled at these subjects in high school and in a few classes I took at college for edification. I've read a large amount of Spanish literature, used to listen to Spanish national radio, used to write political analyses based on Spanish dailies for political science classes, and once considered going into the foreign service. (3) Aside from being qualified with experience, mastery of the subjects, and a love of knowledge, I'm skilled and interested in teaching. Personality-wise, I think I'm a sensitive and empathetic person. By 'sensitive,' I mean that I appreciate the nuances of language, which helps me be a good communicator. I also mean that I'm good at imagining other peoples' thought processes, which helps me help others to overcome the stumbling blocks to their understanding. I'm also good at detecting confusion and worry in students, which helps me know when my students don't understand and also provide my students with emotional support. Finally, I mean that I deeply care about my students' well-being and am very patient. These personality traits helped me become an effective tutor for middle school and high school kids from a low-income neighborhood while I was in college, and is the main reason for which I've decided to pursue a career in medicine, a career for which these traits are very valuable. (4) Finally, though I've done well at school, I have a balanced view of life. I view happiness as the goal of life, and getting an education that's right for you as one of the things that helps one be happy. I very much believe that activities outside of school and character are important, not only as additional factors in the application process but also essential components of happiness. I don't think one should ever study so hard as to give up the extracurricular activities one loves, even if they aren't especially useful for college or medical school. In college and medical school, I've sang in a choir, performed with a Shakespeare troupe, went to lots of performances and exhibitions in New York and San Francisco, and spent a lot of time hanging out with friends. So, if you're looking for a dedicated tutor who wants to help you excel academically and respects and supports you or your child's setting limits on how much work you or your child does, I'm your tutor. I think it's valuable having a tutor with a balanced view of life, especially for high school kids who are under a lot of unbalanced pressure to excel academically and get into the most prestigious college. Qualifications and Approach for Study Skills Development I think I have excellent study skills and do a good job of sharing them with my students. I've developed my study skills by experience and conceptual study. For experience, I have my experience from studying at some of the most rigorous schools in the country. For example, my high school, Hunter College High School in New York City, is ranked as the best public high school in the country by the Wall Street Journal. Similarly, my college, Columbia University, is ranked as the fourth best college in the country by US News and World Report, and my medical school, Stanford Medical School, is ranked as fifth best in the country by US News and World Report. Of course, school rankings have serious flaws, among them the fact that they tend to exaggerate differences between schools. Nonetheless, there's no doubt that I've been through some of the most rigorous schooling in the country and have developed strong study skills as a result. For conceptual study, I studied the psychology of learning in college and have a firm understanding of the psychology underlying effective learning. Let me describe how I help my students develop study skills before I describe why it's an effective approach and why I implement it well. I believe in integrating work on subject-specific content (that is, the specific subject like algebra or biology or English I'm tutoring) with planning together with my student to choose study strategies (like doing practice problems or breaking down the writing process into multiple drafts) and make study schedules. I think there are general study skills that are somewhat transferable between subjects, but I also think that for each subject, each student needs a personalized set of study strategies, and that it's my job -- to help the student identify those strategies and become more capable of identifying similar strategies for future subjects and classes. Some of the study skills I try to develop in my students include time management and planning, pre-reading for class, being willing to ask questions in class, making notes for active review (e.g. flashcards), analyzing test results to identify knowledge and technique gaps and to devise test-taking strategies, and strategically approaching a composition, focusing on the main ideas before grammar and style. I think my approach to developing study skills is effective because it allows students to see that study skills are not merely things that a tutor can discuss with them but are tools that can greatly improve learning. I think I implement well my approach to developing study skills because I've a good general knowledge of study skills, as discussed above, and for two more reasons. First, I have studied and mastered the specific subjects I tutor, so I have figured out study techniques that worked for me for these subjects. Second, I have tutored most of the subjects multiple times by now, so I have experience sharing my techniques with students and have learned techniques that work for students with different personalities as learners from me. Discussion of My Rates In comparison to tutors at local companies, like Stutors and Cardinal Tutors, I think my resume is considerably stronger, and my basic rates of $70/hour for college students, $60/hour for high school students, and $55/hour for middle school students are lower than the rates of $90-110/hour at Stutors and $70/hour at Cardinal Tutors. My basic rates are also lower than the average rate of $75/hour for Kaplan and Princeton Review. Once you apply my discounts for more frequent and regular sessions, my rates become even lower. Please visit my website for more information about me, including testimony from past students, or message me if you're interested, and we can discuss scheduling and such issues by phone or e-mail. Best, Clark