Ben McLean

I tutor Preliminary and HSC Physics one-on-one, and study Medicine at UNSW the rest of the week. I sat these exams in 2023 and finished first in my year in Physics. Everything I teach comes back to reasoning from first principles instead of memorising your way through.

I grew up in Port Macquarie. Beautiful town, always home, and a fair way from the city's tutoring machine. Sport was half my life growing up, soccer, basketball, athletics, touch football at national representative level, and it still is. These days it's running, the gym and rep touch around the medicine timetable. In Year 12 I was school captain and was awarded sportsperson of the year for representing the school, so the HSC happened on a full plate, learning early to make every study hour count. Around all of that I waited tables, made coffee and poured drinks at a local restaurant, the kind of job that teaches you to get comfortable with strangers fast. Useful it turns out, when you now teach them online.

What hooked me on physics is the way it exposes how much of the world we walk past without ever questioning. You spend your whole life around motion and electricity and light, then the course stops you and asks how any of it actually works. Underneath nearly every dot point is Newton's laws in a different costume. Build a deep intuition there and exams stop being memory tests. I finished with 97 in Physics and a 99.15 ATAR.

After school I moved to Sydney and actually started in science and engineering. Rote memorising year 12 biology had driven me crazy, and nothing beat the feeling of taking one concept and systematically breaking down a problem I'd never seen, so I followed the maths and physics route. At uni I realised I wanted people in my career, not just problems. Medicine turned out to be full of both, so I moved. Along the way I've put over 400 hours into 16 students across Years 7 to 12 in maths and the sciences, then narrowed to Preliminary and HSC Physics, because that's where I do my best work.

Medicine broke my Year 12 study habits inside a month. There was simply too much content for how I used to work, so I rebuilt from scratch and have been refining it ever since. Flashcards for the facts that have to be automatic, targeted practice questions to apply the concepts that build off them, strict marking to find exactly where understanding fails, spaced repetition to stamp the gaps out, and the discipline to keep the system in order. I keep thinking the same thing. If I'd had this in Year 12, I'd have gone further with half the effort. Tutoring is how I hand it over.

I ask intentional questions that target and prune faulty understanding. I anticipate the mistake a student is about to make, then ask the question that lets them make it and feel where their reasoning gives way. Errors you've had to untangle yourself stay fixed. And when a question isn't enough, I'll come at the idea from another direction, an analogy, a sketch, acting it out with whatever's in reach, until something lands. As for the pure-recall parts of the course, the scientists and the experiments, they felt unfair to me too, and that's what the system is built for. Flashcards make those marks come cheap, so the real thinking gets the lesson time.

I pride myself on being prepared, and on doing a job properly. Every session is planned for the student in front of me, and when I mark your work I unpack every line of it. I'll show up to the highest standard I can, and I ask the same attitude back, a student willing to wrestle with a question, cop honest feedback, and put the hours in. Trust me with a year and subject this important and I won't waste it.