Andrew

I’m a fourth year medical student doing an intercalated degree in Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College. I previously attended St Paul’s School where I did my A Levels. I’ve always had a passion for my subjects, regularly participating in Olympiads and challenges while at school. In Year 13, I received a gold award in the British Biology Olympiad and a silver award in the UK Chemistry Olympiad. I’ve also received gold certificates in the Senior Maths Challenge every year since Year 11. I was also awarded the 'Best in School' certificate in Year 8 for achieving the highest score in my school for the Junior Maths Challenge.

I have a proven track record of academic excellence, achieving a Distinction Star (awarded to the top 10% of the cohort) in my third year of medicine at Imperial. For my IGCSEs, I obtained 8A*s in Biology, Chemistry, Geography, Maths, Additional Maths, Malay, Physics and Physical Education (PE) and 3As in English, ICT and Economics. I then picked up all three sciences and both maths subjects for my AS year and got 5As. Due to timetable constraints, I could not continue on with Physics the following year which allowed me to focus on my other subjects and I scored 4A*s for my A Levels. I got 95% (while scoring full marks for both written papers) for Biology, 98% for Chemistry, 100% for Maths and 97% for Further Maths.

I scored highly in both the UKCAT and BMAT (790 and 6.5, 5.9, 3A) and am able to offer help in them. I was also part of the Imperial interview panel for 2018 entry so I have first hand experience on how candidates can best prepare themselves for these interviews. I can also give advice on work experience and application tactics.

Tutoring Experience

During my time at St Paul’s, I was the Vice House Captain of the boarding house. I was regularly the first person my peers and juniors turned to for academic help. I have a younger brother who’s currently in Year 13 and I regularly help him with his schoolwork. I also taught underprivileged students from Myanmar English and Maths for two years. In addition to this, I have accumulated over 1000 hours of tutoring experience. These experiences gave me an understanding on how to teach and communicate effectively with students.

I have also been actively taking part in peer-to-peer tutoring within medical school, regularly conducting small group teaching as well as lecture style events.

Tutoring Approach

In this day and age, a lot of weight is put into performing well in exams. After my AS exams, I realised that it is not enough to understand the subject but you also have to think about what the examiner wants to see. I then decided to focus on my exam technique for the following year and had extremely positive results, going from low/mid 90s in AS to high 90s in A2. This is why I place a lot of emphasis on exam technique to make sure my students get the marks they deserve. I was under the CIE exam board for all my IGCSEs except for PE which I took with Edexcel. I took all my A Levels with OCR except for Physics which I took with WJEC. I believe that every exam board is similar in terms of contents covered and I will have no problem teaching any of them.

My teaching style is based on good communication to identify strengths and weaknesses. By doing this, I can plan ahead and allocate my teaching time in order to maximise the outcome of each session. Everyone has different learning styles and it would be a shame for bright students to not reach their potential just because of ineffective learning, which is why I help my students discover the best learning technique for them by trying a range of different techniques. This has worked incredibly well with my current and past students.