Yagos P.

Private tutor in Barcelona, Spain

Education

PhD on Computational Fluid Dynamics from Imperial College London, UK First Class Honors MEng degree from Imperial College London, UK 40 IB grade from Athens College, Greece

Experience

I have a background in working with both children and peers as a tutor. During the summers in Greece throughout my undergraduate years I worked for a summer camp. Children were of ages 9-17 and I was mainly teaching them boxing and leading them to various treks. I arguably had to do an easy job in terms of motivating and keeping the children engaged. Boxing was something considered of interest to all and also trekking was the reason most of the children had signed up for the camp. The challenging part was to face the different learning paces and level of physique of each child without the child feeling either excluded or unable. When I was a student both at school and at university we had formed unofficial study groups. This involved a lot more peer helping and tutoring. Questions that were not answered by one student were explained by another. This approach was of great use to me both in understanding and in teaching. By having to explain to another person a concept and to do it well you need to have understood it yourself first perfectly. In the IB the approach was more on an exam prep basis whereas at university both for exam prep and during the year to explain and understand concepts. I have mastered exam preparation for both myself and peers. I think acing an exam is different to mastering a concept or a subject and neither is prerequisite of the other. In the former, the weight is put on solving the past papers, whereas on the other on the concepts. I think it is important to know that this difference exists and adapt accordingly to the student’s needs. E.g. if someone understands the concepts but does not perform as well in exams the best approach is an exam-prep intensive tuition, and vice-versa. My direct tutoring experience was during the years of my PhD. I was a tutor for matlab, fluid mechanics and mathematics for students in their first and second year of their degree. I taught for 4 years during which I also received the Graduate Teacher’s Assistant training at Imperial College.

Subject Expertise

IB Mathematical Studies SL, IB Mathematics HL, IB Mathematics SL, IB Physics HL, IB Physics SL

Availability

Any day

Can Meet

Up to 30 minutes away for a flat fee

Hobbies

As mentioned I was born and raised in Athens, Greece. At the age of 18 I moved to London for my studies. During my university years I found aspects of my studies that fascinated me and others that did not. I felt a clear tendency towards more theoretical and mathematical subjects, such as fluid mechanics, mathematics, thermodynamics and heat transfer. I found that those subjects transcend what they represent/describe in the physical world (i.e. the motion and energy exchange of fluid and solid bodies). This transcendence and metaphorical application of those subjects was very important for my personal development and further fuelled my other interests. I have always been interested in History, Political theory and philosophy. All three subjects involve an intricate game of scales. How many years are needed for an event to become historical and how many people should it influence? How many people are required for an idea to become an ideology?/ easily coupled to how many molecules are required to characterize the flow, i.e. when do the properties of a fluid become continuous. The concept of scales is closely coupled to situations that you can clearly describe two extremes of a phenomenon (idea/laminar flow vs. ideology/turbulent flow) but not at what point this transition is made. Grabbing from this interest, I pursued my studies further by doing a PhD at the same university (Imperial College) on the subject of turbulent flows and their stochastic description. One of my other passions is travelling and even more living in different places. I enjoy the socio-anthropological interactions that one may have in different towns, cities, countries and continents. After submitting my PhD and before the viva I spent two months in a placement in Washington DC working for a company doing Waste Heat Recovery. September of the same year I went to Trujillo, Peru where I worked for a wind-turbine NGO working on rural electrification optimizing their turbine design and also teaching new recruits and students from the local university the principles of wind energy. Peru also introduced me to new hobbies. In order to meet people and create a social circle I decided that I could take salsa classes. Needless to say I ended up going on a daily basis, both because I enjoyed the company of my classmates and because I found I really enjoyed dancing. Following Peru I returned to London in January 2015 wherein my entrepreneurial activity started by forming Entropea Labs after forming a collaboration with the company I had worked for in the US. At Entropea I worked for around 3.5 years during which I spent two months in Rome as part of a collaboration with the University of La Sapienza. There I gave classes on turbulence and on Computational Fluid Dynamic models. September 2017, I had the urge to move once again and since then I have been living in Barcelona, Spain. I continued my work with Entropea Labs until September 2018. At that point I was offered a great opportunity to form a new company with one of my Professors at Imperial. This company (Solar Flow) has now been formed and we have funding to develop our technology. Another part of my interests and hobbies has followed me throughout the different places that I go and hence I have subtracted it from the chronological approach of outlining my aforementioned interests. These include, sports (I was at my schools and university’s basketball team, I have been boxing for many years on a sporadic nature, I run, do trekking and I adore swimming both in the open sea and in a swimming pool), travelling (I have mentioned it, however, it is one of my great passions both in terms of living in different cities and also visiting different places), music (I play the guitar badly!, but I still appreciate patient companions who want to play with me. I obviously also enjoy to listen to music), reading (my readings are seasonal, during the year I think that the ratio of literature to essays is 1 to 5, whereas in summer and on a beach it is 100% depressing, preferably turn-of-the-20th-century Russians and German writers) I think that the above paints a broad but accurate picture of my interests, but I am happy to discuss or further extrapolate on any of the above