Side-Gig: A Day in The Life of a NYC Tutor: Part 3
Part 3 of our series following the day-to-day lives of real life tutors who use Clark. Every Tutor has a story. What’s yours?
The Tutor
I’m an associate at a finance firm and I tutor test prep for 3–5 students a week. I have a BA from Yale, a MPP from Harvard and an MBA from MIT. I also have a lot of student debt. I like my day job, but what I really love is teaching students how to succeed at taking tests. That’s right — I love standardized tests and if I could, I would take the GRE every day of the week.
- Subjects: GRE, GMAT and SAT test-prep
- Rate: $175-$230/hour depending on the client
- # of students: 5, but I normally only work with students for 4–6 weeks, so I’m constantly seeking new students.
- Pre-Clark admin tools: Excel spreadsheets with contact info and session logs. Also, I relied on my inbox as a to-do list of students I should be reaching out to for follow up session, but students always seemed to fall through the cracks…
The Day
This was a typical day before becoming a Clark user.
The Day In Aggregate
- Total hours worked: 2.5
- Total billable hours: 1.5
- Time spent prepping: 30 minutes
- Hours spent on admin: 30 minutes
The Sessions:
Today I am meeting one of my GRE students before work at 7am. I have to get up early and hustle from the West Side over to midtown where I do most of my sessions. I meet with students there because I get access to free meeting room space and I think that the location elevates my brand as a top-notch tutor. My sessions aren’t cheap, so the professional location and free coffee helps. The irony is, I’m so strapped for cash myself that the free coffee at the club is probably more important to me than my students!
This student is in her early 20s and works full time. She is preparing to take the GRE in 4 weeks and want to get into a top creative-writing grad program. As a result, the student is strong on writing, but needs a lot of help on the math portion of the exam. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me why creative writing students need to take a math exam to get into school, but I’m great at this test so I am happy to help.
We meet for an hour and a half and I have the student bring a practice test I had her take at home. We review which problems she got wrong and try to categorize her mistakes into categories.
From there we spend most of the time reviewing practice questions I brought from a GRE textbook. Right at 8:30 we both run to catch the subway to make it into our day jobs by 9.
Admin:
Once I get into work I use the office copy machine to print out some new practice exams for my session with another student tomorrow. He’s an SAT student and I have less material on this test since they recently changed the format. Later in the day, I check my personal e-mail over lunch and try to respond to all the students I know I need to follow up with.
I see my students an average of five times before they take their test, and I firmly believe that if I can’t get you to your score target during that time, I’ve failed. I pride myself on being able to help students improve quickly, but as a result I have a ton of student turn-over and managing my inbox and student follow up gets mighty confusing.
Have a tutoring story of your own? Submit your day to info@hiclark.com and we’ll publish it (anonymously) in the future!
