We can help with the following subjects and courses:
Drop-in tutoring is offered during CLUE operating hours, 7 pm- 11 pm, Sunday-Thursday. It is a one-on-one tutoring session between you and a tutor. You are expected to bring your own questions and our tutors can help answer them. These sessions are typically 15-20 minutes long.
Exam reviews are offered for the introductory Calculus series (MATH 124, 125 & 126). During the exam review session, tutors will present practice problems and detailed explanations for the answer. Sessions are typically 1.5 hours long.
In person tutoring takes place in Mary Gates Hall commons from 7 pm- 11 pm. Husky cards are required for after hours (after 5pm) access to the building.
Drop-in is currently closed. Visit the CLUE homepage for information on our open hours.
Discussion sessions take place either in person (MGH 2nd floor) or virtually. Virtual exam reviews are offered for on-sequence introductory courses in the following subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Math & Physics.
We are here to help you understand what’s going on, not give you the answer. Coming to CLUE and expecting us to solve your problem for you is going to be a problem. We want to engage you with the question and get you to work through the problem so that you can answer it on your own afterwards.
When a tutor gets to you, they will most likely ask what your question is, if you have attempted the problem, what the relevant material is, if you’ve covered concept xyz, or what your current understanding of the material is. We need to get a feel for where you’re at, before we can start going down our own path.
A question and/or an attempted problem along with a desire to learn. We want to help, we really do! But if you’re just not interested in learning what needs to be done and being with us on the steps we need to take, then that really hurts the vibe.
On paper, 15 minutes. Though they can tend to get a little longer if you ask a particular question that is rather nasty or there’s a concept that you’re really struggling with. If the night is really busy, we will be more strict to keeping to the 15 minutes and leave you to play around with what wisdom we dispense.
Just go back onto the clue queue online site and queue yourself back in, the same way you did so when you first queued up for CLUE tutoring. It does help if you say what your question is in the signup (saying “webassign 1.61” is not as helpful as “I need help with taking the derivative with trig functions”).
Exam reviews are offered for MATH 124, 125, and 126. These exam reviews are led by 2 tutors from the CLUE math team with problems that they think are worth going over. This doesn’t mean they will appear on a test, just that the problem is interesting in terms of the concepts that it goes over, and it’s those concepts that we would like for you to understand. We don't have access to anything that you're covering in your courses, and so we base the problems we go over on what we see when students come in for Drop-In tutoring and what we see on the Math Department’s Exam Archive.
Typically we hold 3 exam reviews per quarter. 1 for each midterm, and then 1 for the final. The midterm reviews last ~90 minutes, but our tutors are more than happy to stay and ask any burning questions you may have. An email is sent to any student in the relevant course regarding information about the exam review.
Sunday through Thursday
Warning: This is written by someone majoring in math.
• Always simplify as you work throughout the problem, but don’t turn things into decimals! It’s better to keep things fractions or with symbols than using their decimal representation (i.e. keep pi as π rather than 3.14 or leaving log(4) as log(4) instead of putting it into a calculator).
• If you don’t fully understand a specific problem, do that problem again! Memorizing how to do a problem is not the same as understanding what you’re doing in a problem, and once you get that, then you can apply it more easily to other problems.
• Practice your basic algebra. Seriously. A lot of students trip up when distributing, pulling out factors, and cancelling terms.
• Always write out your work. It’s fine if you like to do multiple steps in your head, but you should always make sure that the steps you write down are easily understandable.
• Some things can be visualized, others can’t. Our brains can’t think of things with more than 3 dimensions, so keep it within the realm of possibility or just stick to the written on paper math you’re working with.
Our tutors have diverse experiences and come from a variety of disciplines. They have all received significant training and enjoy supporting students at any stage in the academic process!
Meet the Math Tutors
