I'd love to get really good at fermi estimations, and I feel like I'd get better faster if I paid someone to teach me, measure progress, and test me consistently.


I also want to be generally "mathematically mature" so that I'm not afraid of that being a prerequisite for a lot of classes/research. I don't have a specific section of math that I know I'm deficient in, but maybe someone else could talk to me and figure out where I'm lacking


I'd love a tutor for quant interview practice so I can earn-to-give later on etc, and the money to pay a tutor to guide me in the right direction will be vastly less than the compound of the money I'd make as a quant.

 

And this is made harder by being afraid to ask for help non-anonymously as I don't want to look dumb in front of my peers but that curses me to stay at my current level of intelligence forever. Any tips?

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I kind of don’t have an answer here, but I would say there are two things in what you’re asking: finding tutors for obscure subjects per se does seem a bit more difficult that it should or could be, so it’s definitely an interesting question, but I’d probably say, go look on Skillshare, or Brilliant, or just about any MOOCs. If anyone has better tips, I want to know :) But the second thing is, you say you want to learn Fermi estimations, or general-purpose maths. I’d definitely like to learn those myself, so I have the same problem, but it actually should be very easy: there are math textbooks for bachelor students, and Fermi estimations are basically formalized guesstimates. But since I have the same problem of not actually getting very good at those, there must be a roadblock there anyway. I guess your actual problem here is the same as mine: it’s so much easier to learn anything, even something easy, when there’s someone on your back to make sure you keep doing it. If that’s the problem… well I’m also looking for the answer. But I’m sure there are good commitment devices apart from Beeminder, which I haven’t found very helpful in this case. The best would probably be what you’re actually asking for, a tutor to make sure you keep learning, but I don’t know how to find that. Maybe ask a friend to keep an eye on your progress?

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I also don't know how to find tutors for narrow subjects. For instance, I would like a little bit of tutoring about

  • panoptic segmentation
  • dependent types

but I don't know how to find one.