"Hi! I go by Arden, but my legal name is Catherine. I have a B.S. in Biological Sciences from North Carolina State University, a M.S. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida before finishing with a second Master's degree.

I have always enjoyed school and chose to pursue a Ph.D. not for a certain job opportunity, but because I wanted to reach the highest level of learning in my chosen field. I could not get enough of learning! That being said, I have tutored students who do not share my love of learning. For this reason, I try to make learning fun and like to create games to play that aid in studying. When I was tutoring a young Italian boy in the San Francisco Bay area, I created a studying game that incorporated his favorite sport, basketball, so he actually looked forward to our tutoring sessions because he could play basketball at the same time as studying! And his grades improved too.

In middle school, I received a perfect score and was the school winner of a state mathematics test and participated in mathematics competition events, eventually participating at a state-level contest. As a high school student, I tutored middle schoolers and high schoolers in math, science, and Spanish. Math always came easy to me until I reached calculus III, so I am confident in tutoring in math of various levels. However, my favorite subject in high school was biology. In college, I helped my peers study for a variety of classes including calculus, statistics, and many subjects in the sciences. I also was a teaching assistant for an introductory biology class as an undergraduate. After I graduated college, I tutored students in elementary and middle school in all of their school subjects for 6 months. In graduate school, I was a teaching assistant for an introductory biology course and wildlife techniques for three semesters, and I even developed a course for preschoolers." less...