Hainan Lam

Biography

I was born and raised in the East Bay, where a love of learning took hold early and never let go. That curiosity carried me across the country to Yale, where I studied Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. It’s an intensive, endlessly fascinating field that deepened my appreciation for the sciences and for the work of teaching them well.

In truth, I’ve been tutoring for as long as I can remember. By middle school I’d run out of math classes to take, so my school sent me to the local high school each day. Being several years younger than everyone, I felt like an outsider at first, but tutoring the older students turned out to be the thing that bridged the gap. We connected over the very material I was there to learn alongside them. I got my more official start in high school at Brainchild in Oakland, working with K–12 students across English and math, and in college I went on to tutor both series of physics, guiding students through some of the most challenging material in the introductory curriculum. My favorite part of the work has stayed the same through all of it: that moment when everything finally clicks and you watch a student take genuine ownership of a subject they once found intimidating.

At AJ Tutoring, I’ll be focusing on chemistry and the SAT. Both have a reputation for daunting students, but both are subjects I find especially rewarding to teach. What they have in common is that neither is about memorization alone. They reward students who learn not just to identify the right tools, but to recognize which tool a given situation calls for and how to apply it. On the SAT, that means knowing which strategy fits which kind of question; in chemistry, it means seeing which concept applies to an unfamiliar problem. It’s a genuinely transferable skill, and helping students build it, so that daunting problems start to feel approachable, is one of the most satisfying parts of the work.

When I’m not tutoring, you can usually find me playing with my cat Coco or working my way through a stack of nonfiction. I’m an avid reader and always happy to talk about whatever I’ve picked up lately.