638 ratings
Italian nerd
Nicole A.
I turn chemistry from memorized rules into visible cause and effect.
Education
UC San Diego
B.S. in Chemistry, specialization in Biochemistry
Hometown
Sacramento, California
A note from Nicole
“Chemistry is just baking with stricter rules: control your variables, respect the reaction, stop guessing.”
I don't want you memorizing where the electrons go — I want you to feel it, the way I can feel when a caramel is one second from burning. Most "hard" concepts are easy concepts wearing bad notation.
Nicole’s story
Nicole scored a 41 on her first analytical chemistry quiz at UCSD. She rebuilt her approach by treating titrations the way she'd treated macarons since high school in Sacramento: measure exactly, change one variable at a time, taste the result. The method stuck — her brown-butter croquembouche took Best in Show at the 2019 Sacramento County Fair, and she still explains Le Chatelier's principle by way of why her meringues slump on humid days. She TA'd general chemistry for three quarters and kept a running tally of where students actually got lost; turns out it was almost never the hard chapter, and almost always a shaky idea three chapters back.
What students say
4.9 ★ · 638 ratings
“My daughter walked into AP Chemistry with a 68 average and ended the year with a 5 on the exam. Nicole spotted in the first session that she'd never really understood moles — everything since had been built on sand. Two sessions on that one idea and the rest fell into place.”
“I'd bombed the equilibrium unit twice. Nicole had me draw the reaction like a recipe that shifts when you toss in an extra ingredient, and Le Chatelier finally made sense. 56 on the first test, 94 on the retake. She also texts back fast, which mattered the night before.”
“Nursing student here. I hadn't touched stoichiometry in six years and was failing my pre-req chem. Nicole started me over at dimensional analysis instead of pretending I remembered it. Took my grade from a C- to a B+, and I'm doing the math now instead of guessing which formula to plug in.”