Vin A

Tutoring Experience

During my first two years in high school, I volunteered to teach Math and Portuguese for an afternoon a week at a public school that targeted low-income middle and high school students. After two years, I shifted to a more administrative role in this project (which I would keep for the rest of high school), as I wanted to shift to a different teaching direction and start my own program. In junior year, I founded a student-run, free tutoring project to help students struggling with STEM subjects after class. As part of running that program, I was mainly responsible for teaching Chemistry and Biology (although I also taught Physics and Math at the beginning) for fellow high-schoolers. Over my two years with this group, we were awarded the recognition of the best student-run project in the school, and overall helped about 53% of the student body at least once. In that year, I also started contributing to Noic, an online platform aimed at helping students from smaller schools or remote regions prepare for scientific olympiads. In that direction, I prepared mock exams and weekly problem sets that would mimic the actual tests, while also developing texts explaining the content. In a collaboration with other Noic coordinators, I also founded the Brazilian Virtual Chemistry Olympiad (OBQV), the first fully-accessible, online scientific olympiad in the country. I was responsible for elaborating the exams' questions and obtaining financial support (mostly via grants and sponsors) for our platform. Already in the very first year, 517 students took part in OBQV, a figure that rose to 2,035 in year two. In senior year, I started teaching some students as preparation for Chemistry and Biology olympiads, which I myself was deeply involved with throughout high school, per request of my high school's coordinator. During the school year, I'd spend a couple of afternoons and Saturdays with these preparations. After graduation, I was brought back as a teacher and kept teaching Chemistry every other day to students ranging from sixth grade to high school seniors.