Do you have what it takes to be a science tutor?

Science is a broad field which has many branches like biology, chemistry, physics, biochemistry, archaeology, anthropology, earth sciences, life sciences, astronomy, geology, seismology, and applied sciences, engineering, computers, etc. Being involved in science is great because it you help to advance mankind’s knowledge of ourselves and the universe or apply yourself to build products that make our lives easier. Some even say the pursuit of scientific knowledge in itself is reward enough to work in the field of science.

From a tutor’s perspective, specializing in science is a smart choice, since there is a high demand science tutoring. In our previous blog article on a Breakdown for Tutoring Subjects science tutoring ranked on the 2nd place of the most frequent requested subjects together with the English.  Only the math subjects were ranked higher. 17% of all tutoring jobs pertained the field of science.

Ok, you’ve got the interest in science and want to pursue with teaching career. What qualification should a science tutor possess?  You need bachelor or master’s degree in a science related field. When parents look at your resume to hire private tutors, they expect some degree in the science field.

If you can also show some work experience in science parents get even more excited. The work experience doesn’t necessarily require that you’ve worked at the Mauna Lea Observatory as an astronomer or at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory as nuclear physicist, but perhaps you have had a teaching assistant job in your lab? Or have volunteered as a exhibit guide at your local natural history museum.

Say you impressed your client with your qualifications and got the tutoring job. What can you do to make your science tutoring session a worthwhile experience for your student? Step 1: Be well prepared for the specific subject. Science is very big field and nobody expects you to hold all of it in your working memory. So brush up on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrodinger’s cat when tutoring nuclear physics. Step 2 : Make science classes interactive: Give some good motivation at the start of your session. Perhaps you can introduce the concept of electricity with a lighting flash experiment in the beginning. The talk about the theory. Encourage questions and participation of your student. Step 3: Reserve the last ten minutes to a review of the concepts learnt.

Finally, be sure to charge reasonably. As personal tutors, you should know how to charge correctly. Charging too high or too low is not good. Keep an eye on fellow tutors and analyze how much they charge and allocate cost of tutoring accordingly. If you live in Beverly Hills, CA you can probably charge more than in Bakersfield CA.

In summary, being a science tutor is a rewarding job. You can pursuit the joy of science while making money from it. Be sure to have the right qualifications and go prepared into your science tutoring session.

Dirk Wagner

About Dirk Wagner

Dirk Wagner is owner of Tutorz LLC. He holds a M.S. degree in computer science and has 8 years of experience as software engineer and researcher. Dirk has tutored math and computer science to dozens of students in Southern California. You can find him on Google+, youtube, facebook, twitter, tumblr, quora and pinterest.
This entry was posted in Tutoring.

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