Arik S.

Hello, my name is Arik and I’m a Master’s Mechanical Engineering graduate from the University of Bristol with over four years of tutoring experience.

My teaching approach is built around two ideas: first principles and visualisation.

In school, I always wanted to understand why something worked, not just what steps I was supposed to follow. Once I started learning this way, unfamiliar questions became much less intimidating because I could reason through them logically rather than panic about whether I had remembered the right method.

This is now a huge part of how I tutor.

If a student doesn’t understand something, I don’t just repeat the same explanation or immediately give them more questions. I pause and wind back. I think of topics like stepping stones: if one important step is missing, everything that comes afterwards can suddenly feel much harder than it actually is. So instead of pushing ahead, I go back a layer and find the simpler idea the topic is built on. If that still isn’t clear, we go back another step until we reach something the student genuinely understands, and then build back up from there.

The second big part of my teaching is visualisation. Over more than four years of tutoring, I’ve found that there are certain concepts that become much easier for almost anyone once they can actually see what is happening. That’s why I always teach with a tablet and pencil beside me. If explaining something verbally isn’t clicking, I can immediately draw it out, annotate it, rearrange the information or approach it from a different angle.

This approach helped me achieve top grades throughout school, including grade 9s in Maths and the Sciences, followed by 3 A*s (Maths, Biology, Russian) and 2 As at A-level (Further Maths and Chemistry. I later went on to complete my Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol.

I know how frustrating it can be to feel like you should understand something but don’t quite know what you’re missing. Helping students find that missing piece and watching everything begin to click is one of the parts of tutoring I enjoy most.