805 ratings
German nerd
Tanner V.
I make chemistry problems feel like recipes with rules.
Education
University of Wisconsin–Madison
B.S. in Chemistry, minor in Chemical Engineering
Hometown
Green Bay, Wisconsin
A note from Tanner
“I don't want you to memorize that a reaction happens — I want you to call it before I finish drawing it.”
Chemistry is just electrons being greedy and atoms negotiating, and once you can read the deal they're making, every mechanism is the same conversation in a different room. I taught my homebrew buddies why their batch went sour; I can teach you why that nucleophile attacks exactly where it does.
Tanner’s story
Tanner scored a 61 on his first Organic Chemistry midterm and was three points from dropping the major. A TA named Reza stopped him mid-flashcard and asked, "Where do the electrons want to go?" — and Tanner realized it was the exact question his dad asked over the homebrew kits in their Green Bay garage: yeast, sugar, temperature, time, and a system always sliding toward the lowest-energy deal. He finished that semester with an 88, then spent his junior and senior years running UW–Madison's drop-in O-chem help sessions, where he'd graph his own saison's fermentation curve on the board to teach reaction kinetics. He still drives out to the Wolf River most Saturdays to fly fish for brown trout — the only place, he says, where reaching equilibrium feels like winning.
What students say
4.9 ★ · 805 ratings
“I walked in with a 68 in AP Chem and freezing up on every equilibrium problem. Tanner had me redraw Le Chatelier as one of his fermentation graphs and it finally clicked. Ended the year with a 94 in the class and a 5 on the AP exam.”
“Dylan bombed his first two college O-chem exams — 52 and 58. Tanner banned the flashcards and made him narrate every electron push out loud. Dylan pulled an 89 on the final and kept his pre-pharm track. The half star is only because we sometimes had to chase down session times.”
“Stoichiometry was a wall for me until Tanner had me triple a beer recipe on the whiteboard — same mole ratios, suddenly obvious. Went from a C- to an A- in one quarter, and I actually open the textbook now without dread.”