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Natasha
- Rate $119
- Response 1h
$119/hr
Contact
1st lesson free
- Maths
- Physics
- Trigonometry
- Chemistry
- Statistics
Medical Student, class of 2029 at UCSD with over a decade of experience. Welcome to my profile.
- Maths
- Physics
- Trigonometry
- Chemistry
- Statistics
Lesson location
About Natasha
Before academia consumed my life, I was a competitive swimmer for nine years and dreamed of swimming in college. My event was the 200-yard butterfly, and I did quite well despite being only 5'4" on a tall day.
As a teenager, my first dream was to become a veterinarian. Like many young adults, my career aspirations evolved; but in my case, I also realized there was a very real possibility I would try to rescue every stray animal I encountered! I decided teaching might be a safer career choice.
Then I discovered medicine.
At 21, when I first realized medical school might truly be possible for me, I already knew I wanted to care for older adults. I was drawn to a generation whose stories, experiences, and concerns are too often overlooked. Caring for older adults taught me the importance of listening carefully, respecting lived experience, and helping patients understand what is happening in their own bodies. Medicine ultimately gave me a way to combine the two things I loved most: caring for people and teaching.
Today, I hope to work with veterans and contribute to research that improves the way we understand and treat pain. Teaching remains central to that goal. I enjoy explaining the anatomical origins of pain to my geriatric patients, helping students work through difficult scientific concepts, and mentoring future physicians. Teaching can take many forms, and I know it will always be one of my greatest passions.
I do not teach perfection. I teach academic material alongside resilience, confidence, problem-solving, and practical life skills. At the foundation of meaningful learning is something deeply human: connection. Students learn best when they feel understood, supported, and safe enough to make mistakes, ask questions, and admit when they do not know something yet.
I also believe excellent education should be accessible. The pressure placed on students and families to pay exorbitant tutoring rates can be unfair and, at times, predatory. I am halfway through my MD and have years of teaching experience, and I still do not believe effective tutoring should require paying more than $100 an hour.
I offer accessible rates, flexible scheduling, and individualized worksheets and practice materials tailored to each student's needs. I want students to receive thoughtful, high-quality instruction without making their families feel that academic success is something they have to purchase at an unreasonable price.
And, in the interest of complete transparency, much of what I earn from tutoring ultimately supports my rescue rabbit, Birdy, and his bun wife, Jasmine. There is no elaborate ulterior motive here: I genuinely love teaching, and my rabbits get hay and toys in exchange. It is a pretty good arrangement for everyone involved and Birdy and Jasmine might even make a guest appearance on special occasions (or when they don't receive their rationed treats on time)!
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About the lesson
- Primary
- High School
- NCEA Level 1
- +5
levels :
Primary
High School
NCEA Level 1
NCEA Level 2
NCEA Level 3
Adult education
Masters
Doctorate
- English
All languages in which the lesson is available :
English
I love STEM, but I do not think STEM always does a particularly good job of loving its students back.
I know that from experience. In high school, chemistry, physics, calculus, and statistics made me feel awkward, incapable, and sometimes genuinely unintelligent. I was quiet; almost mute academically. I did not think I had anything particularly important to contribute, and I was often paralyzed by the possibility of saying something wrong.
Then, somewhere along the way, I suddenly had a lot to say.
And, to my surprise, people found what I had to say interesting.
I think part of that happened because I had never learned only from books. I learned biology from David Attenborough documentaries and from whatever I could find in my backyard. I learned about movement and physiology through nine years of competitive swimming. I learned about animals by working in an animal shelter. I learned by watching, questioning, noticing patterns, and collecting little pieces of information long before I knew the formal scientific language for what I was seeing.
For a while, though, I thought success meant blending in.
I looked around at students who seemed completely consumed by achievement and assumed that, if I wanted to succeed too, I needed to become more like them. I worried that the parts of my life that existed outside of school; maintaining friendships, traveling, working, caring for animals, noticing the world around me; were evidence that I was not serious enough or disciplined enough to belong in medicine.
Over time, I began to see that there was no single formula for becoming a physician. I watched people make enormous sacrifices for a particular outcome and still face disappointment, while my own path continued to unfold in ways I had never expected. I still had friends from college. I worked. I traveled. I had interests that had nothing to do with medicine. I paid attention to the world around me and let myself care deeply about things that would never appear on an application.
Because of that, I was almost convinced medical school was out of reach.
Instead, I eventually learned that those experiences had not distracted me from becoming an academic. They had helped create one.
The textbook eventually gave names to things I already knew how to wonder about.
Piece by piece, those different ways of learning began to fit together. The student who had once felt too awkward or unintelligent to speak became someone with questions, explanations, connections, and eventually a great deal to say. I began to feel whole as an academic; not because I had finally memorized enough information, but because I realized that the way I had experienced the world was itself a meaningful way of learning.
Years later, I earned A's in the same subjects that once intimidated me at UC San Diego and went on to tutor them, teach them, TA them, and even write exam questions for some of those courses.
I did not suddenly become a different person.
I finally learned how to translate the curiosity I had always possessed into the language of academia.
That experience shapes the way I teach. Sometimes the problem is not a student's intelligence, or even the material itself. Sometimes it is the way that material has been presented. A student may understand far more than they realize; they simply have not yet been given the vocabulary, confidence, or environment to recognize that what they already know has value.
Curiosity requires courage, especially when a classroom has already made you afraid of being wrong.
I want my students to feel that their observations, experiences, strange questions, and unconventional ways of making connections belong in science too.
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Recommendations
Recommendations come from relatives, friends and acquaintances of the teacher
1
Natasha and I went to UCSD undergrad together and took many classes together. She always was super helpful in explaining topics to me - I will never understand how her brain processes how to teach complicated topics so well! I would never have passed Chemistry without her. She has vast experience tutoring high school students as well with glowing results on AP exams.
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Rates
Rate
- $119
Pack prices
- 5h: $551
- 10h: $1017
free lessons
The first lesson with Natasha will allow you to get to know each other and discuss your needs for future lessons.
- 30mins
online
- $119/h
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