USC sophomore creates a college tutoring platform

When sophomore Kyle Adomian was a freshman taking calculus at USC, he sought the help of a non-USC affiliated tutor. After working with a tutor who was generally familiar with calculus but unfamiliar with the type of calculus taught in his class, Adomian came up with TutorTies, a college tutoring platform that connects students with tutors who have experience in specific USC classes. 

“The tutors were distant, and they lacked the familiarity with the specific course at USC, or even the specific professor,” said Adomian, a business administration major. “They would need time to understand not only the concepts you were going through, but the teaching styles of the teacher [and] how you as a student interpret certain things, and we saw that as almost a waste of time and money.” 

TutorTies will launch in the fall as an app, but the platform is currently offering a “tutor matching concierge” service during the remote learning period. Similar to how the app will function, Adomian, along with his team, matches students with tutors based on classes and professors. 

He started reaching out to students last month to tell them about the service. It was a lot of dirty work, Adomian said: looking at teacher assistant schedules to find possible tutors, reaching out to students via email and going through the student directory. Currently, TutorTies has 80 tutors signed up, who have booked 20 sessions in about three weeks. So far, some students have had weekly sessions, and others have had daily sessions with their tutor. 

“We just recently started putting it out there that students can fill out a Google form with their specific specifications on what they need help with,” Adomian said. “We do basically what the app would do and match you … with a tutor.”

Sarah Russell, a graduate student studying business analytics who found out about TutorTies through an email from Adomian, had a tutoring session for modern statistical learning methods over Zoom. Russell said TutorTies asked for the project and data sets she was working on beforehand, so her tutor was ready for their session. 

“He had already come up with different ideas to help,” Russell said. “He’d already played with the data, looked at the project and everything — so super well-prepared, very friendly.”

The app, which is still being developed, will allow both students and tutors to set up their profiles with information about their subject, classes and professors. Students and tutors will then be able to search the TutorTies platform to find similar matches. When either a student or a tutor swipes on another corresponding profile, both will be placed into a chat room to schedule a session. What makes TutorTies unique to other tutoring platforms is the tutors’ ability to initiate the conversation, Adomian said. Users have the option to meet online or in person. 

“Why we decided to do swipe-to-match for the students is this kind of dopamine rush that surrounds this new kind of trend of swiping to match,” Adomian said. “It’s this concept of gamifying a fairly mundane task.”

The swipe-to-match technology is a part of a wider effort to streamline the tutoring process. Along with that, tutors’ payments are deposited into their bank accounts immediately, Adomian said. Currently, there is no maximum price the tutors can charge, although Adomian hopes to create a lower bound to avoid a bidding war among tutors.  

Fang Fu, a graduate student studying chemistry, has already done two Zoom conferences with her student on organic chemistry material. Fu, who had previously worked as an organic chemistry teaching assistant, said TutorTies helped her learn new techniques for her lab, which is mainly about organic synthesis. 

“It’s not only that I can help the students — it’s also helped me to go through the concept and some principles of organic chemistry, which I learned when I was an undergraduate,” Fu said. “It’s also to make the knowledge more solid, and it’s also helped me a lot.”

Adomian plans to expand TutorTies to nearby schools, including UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. He and Austin Hill, head of design and content curation, hope to target the colleges their high school friends attend and begin to recruit ambassadors for their service.

“I think the goal initially is just to become the most used tutoring service and get the name spread out among USC,” said Hill, a sophomore majoring in economics. “I know Kyle has bigger goals for the future, like trying to implement it at other schools, but that would be further in the future.”

Adomian said he hoped TutorTies would provide a more streamlined, personal experience for students looking for help with classes.

“I want to be able to provide a service … to make the process of going through school and getting your degree something that is not easier, but more manageable,” Adomian said. “Nobody wants to spend hours of their undergraduate career looking for the right tutor being charged too much from a big tutoring company.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that TutorTies tutors had booked 20 sessions in three months. They booked the sessions in about three weeks. The Daily Trojan regrets this error.