Ben C.

• Princeton University, computer sciences
• New York, NY

Hello!     My name is Ben Cohen. I graduated from Princeton University with a degree in computer science, and I am now a software engineer at Uber, living and working in New York City.

            My tutoring approach depends on the subject that I am teaching.      For STEM tutoring, I usually start by assessing what the student knows, then present them with questions of increasing difficulty to help them improve. I am very hands-on in my approach, meaning that I step in when needed to help explain questions and show where students might go wrong in their solution.     For language tutoring (Spanish and Hebrew), I teach students the art of "thinking in the language", so that they can stop translating from English and start speaking more fluently. I help students devise mneumonics, understand verb conjugation and other grammatical concepts, help students practice vocabulary, go through worksheets, and look for additional materials (podcasts, websites, books) for immersing the sudent in the language.     For college prep tutoring (essays, college applications), I read the student's essays and provide both high-level and specific feedback. High-level feedback includes prompts meant to help the student iterate on their essays. Sample prompts include: "How can you make this essay better?"; "What are you trying to tell the reader?"; "How can you reorder the paragraphs to make the ideas flow more smoothly?"; and more. Specific feedback comes in the form of grammatical, spelling, and stylistic edits on a line-by-line basis.

            I have been tutoring since my junior year of high school, and have helped dozens of students - in middle school, high school, and college - get higher grades and prepare for college. In high school, I tutored chemistry, math (up to AP Calculus AB), Spanish, Hebrew, English, and history. In college, I continued tutoring these subjects, as well as SAT prep, computer science, and college essay prep.     As an engineer I work across the stack, working both on back-end (database management, API calls - mostly Go and Python) and front-end (website development, working in React and Node.js). I have tutored both of these subjects, helping students prepare for coding interviews.

            Running, music blogging, theater, coding side-projects, language learning, reading