Vasile

Hiya! I'm currently a fifth year medical student at Oxford; medicine is a subject where Biology, Chemistry, Physics, logic and basically all subjects come together, which is why I love studying it. I sat all of my exams pre-COVID, so have experience with in-person exams, but I have also done online exams at university.

I have been involved with tutoring and mentoring at school such as helping students in lower years with various subjects, as well as doing science experiments with students from a special needs school. I am also a mentor on the Zero Gravity platform. I love tutoring because helping people brings meaning to my life, and I can revisit subjects that I loved at school.

My lessons will be as interactive as possible, and I'll ask you a lot of questions because I think that that's the best way to learn; I hated lessons where the teacher just read off of the power-point. I'll try and get you to draw diagrams as well. Learning subject material is really important, but so is exam technique, and we can practice that by regularly doing past paper questions, which covers both aspects well.

Tutoring Experience

I have over 700 hours of lessons completed across various tutoring sites and modalities, and have a very good idea of all exam boards for the subjects I tutor because of the range of students I have had!

Tutoring Approach

My lessons are structured depending on how the student learns, and what they want to learn; if, for example, a student is having trouble with the cardiac cycle, then we'll go through the content together, followed by some practice questions to review what we've just done and then some real past paper questions to test their knowledge in an exam situation.

I love drawing diagrams as I think that they're a great way to learn, especially in subjects like Biology and Maths, where visualising things can be very useful.

Helping students achieve goals gives a real boost to their confidence, so I try to set out short-term goals such as those to complete within a lesson, as well as longer-term goals such as being able to answer a variety of questions on a topic to have something to aim for over a few sessions. I measure progress by regularly asking questions within the lesson to see how student's feel about a topic we have just covered or covered some time ago.

I think that interacting with the student is the most important thing to encourage learning; no-one wants to just sit there an be talked at! I'll try to get the student as involved as possible to help them drive their own learning and to make it a co-operative experience!