Personal Description:

Hello! My name is Marissa, I am a PhD candidate (i.e… in progress) in Biology (3rd year). I study at the University of Victoria, but I live in Nanaimo. My research is primarily based at Vancouver Island University (VIU). I have an office at VIU where I can meet with students for tutor sessions.

Tutoring Experience:

I was a teaching assistant (TA) for 2nd-year Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Victoria for 1 year. My TA duties included lecturing/running labs and marking assignments (including lab reports, essays, and oral presentations). From this, I gained important perspectives as a teacher, including understanding how assignments are marked and identifying materials that will be put on exams. I finished my undergraduate degree with a 4.00 GPA, including an A in Organic Chemistry I and an A+ in Organic Chemistry II. I was a peer support learning (PSL) leader for Organic Chemistry at VIU during my undergraduate degree. As a PSL leader, I attended classes and took quizzes/exams with the students, and subsequently, we would go through test materials as a group. In the Fall of 2024, I started tutoring Organic Chemistry again as a volunteer tutor at VIU.

Tutoring Approach:

My approach to tutoring includes 1) increasing independence while completing practice problems, 2) creating organizational frameworks to understand learning materials, and 3) practicing information recall for exam settings. With this, I aim to help the student not only understand the material while studying but also practice applying this to exam settings so that the student's progress is reflected in exam scores. Although my tutoring experience is largely based in the sciences, these skills have wide applications for learning and understanding a broad range of subjects.