Our teaching philosophy prioritizes personalized instruction and deep understanding, drawing on our founder’s diverse academic background in chemistry, literature, philosophy, and neuroscience to foster student motivation and lifelong learning skills.
— Albert Einstein
Mackenzie commands thousands of hours of teaching experience across all ages and learning types and a broad range of subjects to help your student flourish. Mackenzie develops and teaches curricula around students’ unique learning styles to empower them with valuable, lasting academic skills and knowledge.
Tutoring Experience
Mackenzie’s first foray into teaching was as an employed chemistry tutor at University of South Florida’s library in Tampa, FL, where he taught other college students advanced organic chemistry, biochemistry, and related subjects for two years. Upon graduation, Mackenzie was hired at an established local tutoring company — scoring a perfect 36 on an ACT during the hiring process — where he quickly became one of their most requested tutors. After five months working in corporate tutoring, however, Mackenzie realized that he could offer students much more as a private tutor — rather than rigidly following “one-size-fits-all” teaching methods, Mackenzie could draw on his own years of intensive study and experience to flexibly tailor learning plans to student’s individual goals and needs. In the eight years since, Mackenzie has worked with hundreds of students to achieve their scholastic goals, whether they be straight A’s or admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities.
Education
Mackenzie entered college at the University of South Florida Honors College at age 16, where he studied a variety of subjects intensively — from early Modern literature, to continental philosophy, to creative writing and linguistics, to biochemistry. He graduated summa cum laude with a double major in Biomedical Sciences (B.S.) and German Studies (B.A.), earning numerous scholarships and awards along the way. In 2016, Mackenzie was awarded a Fulbright Research Grant to live and research in Germany for two years in a Nobel prize-winning nanobiophotonics laboratory. Upon returning to the United States, he conducted neuroscience research and earned a Master’s degree (M.S.) in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; thesis). These days, Mackenzie applies this broad education and rigorous training in analytic thinking to dissect patterns in standardized tests.
Every student brings a different educational history, different aptitude to various subjects, different set of interests, different source of motivation, and different way of thinking about and approaching problems. In developing student learning plans, we think intensively about how we can adjust our teaching style to cater to each of these individualities to engage students and help them succeed.
Any tutor can present students with the means to rote memorization — notecards, mnemonics, and repetitive exercises. Our tutoring process involves drawing connections to existing knowledge and experience to provide a deep, intuitive understanding of the subject matter. This kind of knowledge not only retains longer but also empowers our students to utilize this knowledge more flexibly and effectively in new topic areas.
Our first and most fundamental job with a student is to understand their sources of motivation and interest. Students simply learn much more effectively when they feel personally invested and engaged in the process. They are more attentive in session, more willing to complete homework, and more likely to go the extra mile to get what they want, when they know that they — not just their parents or school — want it.
For standardized test prep, any number of hacks (e.g. always choose the shortest answer choice on English) can lead to minimal improvement on the test. However, true, significant improvements are earned through a deep understanding of the test’s mechanics and content. Our students learn the latter.
