Electrical and Electronics Tuition from a University Lecturer: Circuits, Signals, Control Systems and Power Electronics

Find out more about Ghous

• When did you develop an interest in your chosen field and in private tutoring?

  I got into electronics as a teenager by taking things apart, mostly old radios and remote controls, and not always getting them back together. That turned into a BSc in electrical engineering in Islamabad and later an MSc in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Chester. The tutoring started almost by accident. Friends on my course kept asking me to explain circuit theory before exams, and I realised I enjoyed that part more than the exams themselves. I have been teaching privately ever since, alongside a visiting lecturer role at Chester.

• Tell us more about the subject you teach, the topics you like to discuss with students (and possibly those you like a little less).

  I teach Maths and Physics up to A Level and IB, Python and C++, Arduino and electronics, and I support university students with engineering modules and final year projects. My favourite topics are the ones where the maths suddenly turns into something physical. Capacitors, oscillations, control systems, anything where you can point at a circuit and say "this is what that equation is doing". I am less fond of teaching pure rote recall, things like memorising definitions for the sake of a mark scheme, though I still make sure my students can do it when the exam demands it.

• Did you have any role models; a teacher that inspired you?

  My MSc supervisor, Dr Samar Ansari. He never gave me a straight answer when I asked for one. He would ask what I thought first, let me talk myself into a corner, and then point at the one assumption I had not questioned. It was frustrating at the time and it made me a much better engineer. I try to do the same thing with my own students, though I admit I am a bit quicker to give in than he was.

• What do you think are the qualities required to be a good tutor?

  Patience is the obvious one, but I think the bigger one is diagnosis. Most students who say "I don't get trigonometry" actually have a gap somewhere three topics earlier, and your job is to find it rather than repeat the lesson they already did not understand at school. After that it is preparation. I write my own materials for every student so the lesson is built around their exam board and their specific weak points, not a generic worksheet. And honesty. If a student is not ready for a paper yet, they need to hear it early enough to do something about it.

• Provide a valuable anecdote related to your subject or your days at school.

  During my undergraduate degree I spent an entire evening on a circuit that only worked when I rested my finger on the breadboard. I was convinced I had discovered something. I had not. It was a floating input pin picking up noise from my own body, and it needed a pull down resistor that cost about two pence. I still tell students that story, because it is a good reminder that the answer is usually boring, usually simple, and usually written in the datasheet you skipped.

• What were the difficulties or challenges you faced or still facing in your subject?

  Electromagnetics nearly finished me off in second year. I could pass the exams by pattern matching the questions, but I could not picture what was actually happening, and that gap followed me into later modules. What fixed it was building things and watching them fail. Engineering also moves quickly, so there is always something to catch up on. At the moment it is machine learning on small embedded devices, which barely existed as a practical option when I started my degree.

• Do you have a particular passion? Is it teaching in general or an element of the subject or something completely different?

  Embedded systems, genuinely. Writing code that makes a physical object do something in the real world never stops being satisfying. Outside of that I am building a STEM tuition business with a friend, which scratches a different itch. And I like the moment in a lesson when a student stops nodding politely and starts arguing with me about the answer. That usually means they have actually understood it.

• What makes you a Superprof?

  I have taught at university level and at Year 7 level in the same week, so I am used to adjusting how I explain things rather than expecting the student to adjust to me. Every student I take on gets written materials made specifically for them, worked examples and past paper walkthroughs, so they have something to revise from after the lesson ends. I also teach the subjects I actually work in, which means I can answer "when would I ever use this" with a real example instead of a shrug.