1. Schools I've attended

• Stanford University School of Medicine

• Columbia University

• Hunter College High School

Stanford medical school is ranked by US News & World Report as the 5^th best research medical school in country. More importantly, in the fields of basic biological research, whether judging by the number of researchers highly cited in the last 10 years or by the number of researchers generously funded by the highly selective Howard Hughes Medical Insitute or by US News & World Report rankings, Stanford is often the best and almost always in the top 3.

Columbia University is ranked by US News & World Report as the 4^th best college in the country. One main reason I chose Columbia is that I received a financial package whereby I did not have to pay tuition.

Hunter College High School is a selective public high school in New York City with admission based on a multiple-choice math and English exam and an essay. It has been ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the best public high school in the country and the 10^th best high school in the country, the only public school in the top 30. Hunter was also one of a group of public high schools named as the best in the country by Newsweek.

It’s true that rankings of schools are extremely flawed. One of the biggest flaws is that they tend to exaggerate minor differences between schools in attributes like research funding (this flaw is especially true of the Wall Street Journal study; another of the biggest flaws is that they tend to make readers overlook non-quantifiable differences between schools, like the philsophy with which a place is run, or the kind of personalities a school tends to attract). However, I think my admission to and experience of highly selective schools does to some degree qualify me as a tutor.

2. My standardized test scores

I think that outstanding performance on a standardized test is one factor that qualifies a tutor to prepare students for the standardized test. (Other factors include an understanding of how the test works and ability to convey that understanding even to a student whose initial approach to the test is different). Here are my scores for the standardized tests I have taken.

SAT I

Total: 2380 (>99^th percentile)

Verbal: 800

Math: 780

Writing: 800

SAT II’s

Math 2C: 790 (>99 percentile)

Biology: 780 (>95^th percentile)

Advanced-Placement (AP) Exams

5's on AP US History, English Language and Composition, Biology, and BC Calculus

4 on AP Spanish

Medical College Admission Test (MCAT)

36 (95th percentile)

3. My academic experiences with particular subjects

A. Math and natural sciences

I’m qualified to tutor math and the 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.

B. Social sciences

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 as described above was one of the best in the country and very intellectually rigorous. 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.

C. Humanities

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.