YOU ARE DRIVEN - When it comes to professional athletes, getting an experienced, successful coach is more than just the norm, it is recognized as a critical prerequisite for success. Good coaches know the mistakes and bad habits you are prone to make and have the skills to spot them early, saving you time and keeping you as strong a competitor as possible. With chemistry, the idea is the same: if you are doing well, a good coach can make you excellent. If you are doing excellent, a great coach can make you the best. If your goal is acceptance into strong med school programs, your best approach is to ensure success by getting a coach as soon as possible.

YOU ARE PIVOTING - The process of changing careers can be daunting. On the one hand, studying is a perishable skill; It is quickly replaced by the skills needed to survive in your workplace and requires practice to get back up to speed. On the other hand, pivoting careers provides a serious logistical challenge: How do you balance in-class performance with already-overloaded schedules? The solution

YOU ARE STRUGGLING - Chemistry is deeply challenging and demands a significant time investment between learning and problem solving. For some students, studying can devolve into aimlessly flipping through notes, or growing frustrated at answer keys with no explanations. Most frustrating of all, you may sit down with the intention of completing a problem set only to find you don’t know how to start the problem in the first place. In these cases, seeking help is critical to prevent falling behind or burning out from over-studying.

Improvement comes from deliberate practice.

The best practice blends great resources with expert coaching.

You may wonder: with free options like office hours, drop-in tutoring, and external resources like YouTube, why would students choose My Chem Mentor?

1. Office hours can naturally make some students feel intimidated. Those that do show up may find their office packed with students (especially around exam time) because they know experienced educators can best explain the concepts. If you are a commuter off campus that day, you may have to drive in just for the chance to get a few questions answered. Even worse, if another course overlaps with their office hours, you lose it as a resource entirely even if you are on campus.

2. While drop-in tutoring can be helpful, it can often be difficult to get enough help from TAs that are managing many students at the same time. As a result, your immediate questions may get answered, but you may not feel you have necessarily learned much because there was no guided learning from an experienced educator and you received less feedback than you may need due to lack of sustained attention.

3. Free resources, particularly those on YouTube, are extremely valuable tools! They are generally well-structured, available whenever you need them, and you can go at your own pace. That said, these videos end, and once they do, you have no additional practice or guidance. Having relatively few examples to work through prevents you from building strategies to approach more complex exam-style problems. Besides that, videos offer no opportunity for real-time discussion with the instructor during practice. If you have questions about a critical step or concept while they work through the problem, you are out of luck.