Our Pre Medical Program Guides Your Child To Success In Medicine & Healthcare
We ask tough questions. We instill values and teach learning strategy. Our program was created our Founder, Eric Earle, who is a pre-medical postgraduate student himself. Eric is acing his courses. His success stemmed from the early math and chemistry tutoring he had for several months prior to his pre-medical studies. These months put him far ahead of the pack.
The Pre Medical Program
“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”
―Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Our Pre Medical Program focuses on developing strong math and chemistry skills in our students. But medical education is about more than just that these days. Doctors need to be strong communicators, understand psychology and sociology, and be able to write effectively. Eric M Earle, our founder, studied all of these subjects extensively. As an undergraduate, he studied: human psychology & motivation, communication & public speaking, writing & editing. He studied these subjects because he was uniquely passionate and curious about them at different points in his life. However, he later learned that these skills are highly valued by medical schools, too. Eric realized, after speaking with admissions experts and countless medical progessionsals, that admission committees are now searching for potential physicians who are smart and who also have the softer skills.
One skill that future physicians need is the ability to write. Our Pre Medical Program has dedicated writing tutors who help guide middle and high school students in learning the craft of writing, editing, personal expression and story telling. Writing is important because its a useful skill required in nearly every area of life. In addition, it is a critically important skill for medical school admissions. In a medical school application essay, you are required to express ideas and thoughts deeper than the surface level. You have to reach the root of why you want to be a doctor, what experiences drove you towards health care. And you have to be able to write about these moments with vivid detail.
The Whole Package
All of these subjects—math, chemistry, writing, psychology, communication—merge together in the Ultimate Pre Medical Program Package. Spanish is also available—as is Medical Spanish. In addition, overall guidance and counseling is provided.
The great thing about this package is that it’s a team effort. You can sleep well knowing that you have an entire team of tutors ready and able to help your child succeed and excel. The tutors are here to help your child hone every aspect of the material, while also growing and maturing as a person. Because that’s what getting into medical school takes: growth. The application process is challenging. Applicants have to demonstrate significant periods of growth and development in their essays.
What Courses Should Your Child Be Taking?
We recommend taking chemistry, biology, and physics classes in middle / high school. In math, we encourage you to find some discovery-based learning options. These courses focus on concepts. And when you get to higher levels of math, such as calculus, the concepts are so beautiful that it makes sense to learn them. Most people struggle through advanced math and they don’t even know the core ideas of what they just learned! That’s a shame. The concepts of caclulus—rate of change, accumultation—are life-changing ideas. They change how you think about science. They help you in General Chemistry, when rates and become increasingly important.
Math Education
Mathematics has beauty and romance. It’s not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It’s an extraordinary place; it’s worth spending time there.
—Marcus du Sautoy
Learning math in this way will give your child confidence in math. There is a tonne of research that students learn math best by engaging in small group discussions about math. The key is this: we learn mathematics when we attempt to verbalize our mathematical thinking. Therefore, classes which encourage your child to not only think and reason about math but also to explain their reasoning to others, offer you the biggest benefit. In addition, classes which challenge your student are the most effective. There is a tonne of research coming out which shows that when we struggle with ideas before we learn them, we actually end up learning more.
That is also a big benefit of math tutoring with Tutor Portland. Our tutors understand the research behind mathematics education. We work hard to ensure that our students are being challenged.
Chemistry and General Science Education
Science is built up of facts as a house is of stones, but a collection of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house.
—Henri Poincare
There is a long line of research that shows students in high school should be given a few topics to master instead of long lists. Normally science is taught term-by-term. There are certain topics which are scheduled to be taught, so the teacher follows course and runs through these subjects as quickly as possible. That does two things: 1) it leaves a lot of kids behind and 2) it causes the young learners to miss out on soldifying important concepts. This is a shame because in science education each concept builds on the previous one. Students who have a firm footing and solid understanding of the ideas that came before have a dramatically higher change of understanding, enjoying, and mastering the upcoming material.
One other important, often overlooked attribute, of science education is motivation. Learning science and chemistry takes an incredible amount of effort. Students need to read, attempt practice problems, and continue write scientific lab reports. Moreover, they need to understand the concepts of the course on a deeper level. Classes, or tutoring sessions, need to be structured in a way that maximizes curiosity. Not all science courses do this. That’s one area where tutoring can help. In our Pre Medical Program, you child will be exposed to scientific thought leaders. We will ask the right questions—and do interesting demonstrations—to get them pondering the deeper answers & meanings to science.
Writing Education
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
The above quote illustrates it pretty well. Writing is important. It helps you in every course you take. Importantly, it helps you write application letters to undergraduate colleges and to graduate work at medical schools, too. To put it simply: medical schools aren’t impressed by the facts that you list. They are impressed by the quality of the stories that you tell them. You have to show the admissions board the effect that certain experiences have had on you. It’s not enough to say that you are a medical scribe… you must write about how that experience made an impact on you. Write about the skills or realizations you had as a result. Instead of telling them, show them.
Details On Our Pre Medical Program
Our program is available to middle and high school students in the Portland area. The program consists of weekly tutoring—in the above core areas—and monthly monitoring of your progress with one of our pre-medical experts. An initial consultation will be conducted to analyze the core area that your student needs help in. In the past we have found that students are highly skilled in math and science, but they are lacking solid communication and writing skills. Today most medical schools realize that, being a good doctor is as much about communication as it is about science. We have tutors who can help your child increase their self-awareness, confidence, and interpersonal communication skills. Much of communication boils down to self-awareness and empathy.
More and more medical schools are looking for doctors who have less ego and more empathy. Emapthy is about being attuned to others. Empathic people are able to recognize upsetting emotions and comfort people.
With the advent of new technology, every profession is under pressure. Health care is not immune to these power forces. The doctor of the future will understand math, chemistry, science, writing, psychology, communication, public speaking, and empathy. They will understand technology and human learning. These are all skills our program is designed to foster and improve.
The prices of our program are not disclosed on our website. If you are interested, please reach out to our founder, Eric M Earle, for more information. He can be reached at: eric@tutorportland.com or (503) 347 7102.