USYD Science Tutor Fergus

GAMSAT non-science background - 75/87/65 and 73/81/67. My name is Fergus and I’m a first year medical student at USYD. I offer tutoring for S1 and S2. I’ll leave an outline of my credentials, experience, and tutoring style + rates below. Credentials and tutoring experience - S1 = 75 and 73 - S2 = 87 and 81 - 5y of HSC tutoring - B. Psych with First Class Honours and University Medal at USYD - If you just want to look at my essays rather than commit to tutoring, piece this together: https://delirious-puma- 9f1.notion./S2-Essays-cda0853de4e440c2802de3f4bbd85a57 (put "site" after the "notion.") Rate: $115 per session (includes any essays you want marked after the session + email questions whenever you want). $40 for feedback on two essays. Location: Online preferred, or USYD campus. Tutoring style: How our sessions are run is partly up to you, so always keep in mind what you would like to focus on and I can tailor our sessions around that. With that in mind, I have some general session plans I fall back on when you're not sure what to do. For S1, I think close reading practice is a good start. We read the text out loud, make sense of each sentence as best we can, and then approach the questions. From this close reading, we come up with a set of strategies and heuristics for interpreting texts, images and graphs. There are some tips, like “summarise small chunks of text as you go along”, that I recommend to everyone, but we come up with specific strategies for areas that you struggle with too. For example, some students struggle with interpreting texts but are great at answering questions when they understand the text - some have the opposite problem. So diagnosing where your weaknesses are and coming up with strategies for fixing them is really important. As we near the GAMSAT date, some students like to shift toward small practice exams. We spend 20 minutes doing questions under exam conditions (I'll do the questions too), and then we compare our answers and reasoning before checking our scores. This allows you to see my reasoning while I can see yours, and it’s often in this comparison and conversation that students gain higher order insights into test strategy beyond specific “do’s and don’ts”. For S2, I have three focuses. The first is psychometric qualities: writing an essay that displays the qualities of a good doctor/dentist. Qualities like compassion and humility, and how you can display these qualities in your essays. Next is structure: making sure you write your essays in a way that is conducive to understanding. Structure needs to work for you, so it’s a balancing act of writing what feels natural + following tried and true methods that ensure clarity (like signposting your main takeaways at the end of each paragraph). Lastly, and most difficult, is generating ideas: making sure your essays are somewhat unique compared to other test takers. This is where background knowledge can help, but I also have some heuristics for coming up with somewhat left-field takes. For both sections, most of the improvement occurs between sessions. Whether this is practicing S1 questions or sending me essays for further feedback, the practice you do between sessions is key to success. If you’re interested, send me a message and any questions or concerns you have, and we can go from there.