Hello Quarantunes Family!
We are excited to announce our shift into using the Tutorbook software to help you schedule classes and communicate with teachers. But this shift wouldn’t be complete without giving some attention and well-deserved recognition to the person behind it all, Nicholas Chiang.
Nicholas set up Tutorbook some time ago, after witnessing a need in his high school. There was a 30 hour community service requirement to graduate, and he decided to fill this requirement through peer tutoring. It was while doing tutoring that he noticed an inefficiency in the system made to help set up students with tutors: the only place where all the information on tutors, what classes they could teach, and their availability was kept was in a single binder, that one woman was tasked with going through to assign pairs. This could make the process of finding a tutor take up to a week, not to mention placed the sole burden on one woman and a binder.
Nicholas, who’d already had experience coding, knew there was a way to solve this problem. Thus came the first glimpses of Tutorbook, a software created to connect students with teachers of all sorts who could help them in their classes. While initially started as an Eagle Scouts project for his school, it’s now expanded to include quite a few operations, with Quarantunes proudly becoming one of them.
Nicholas’s coding experience started in freshman year, when he took FOOP, or functional object oriented programming, and took AP Computer Science afterwards. While a good introduction to coding, he found that he’d prefer to solve problems instead of just learn about how people solved problems in the past. With a family friend working on a PhD, he spent a summer and wrote a paper on machine learning, and thus began his foray into independently pursuing his passion.
Along with continuously working on Tutorbook’s upgrades, Nicholas is also part of a start-up attempting to smoothen the process of managing newsletter subscriptions. The startup was so successful that they managed to secure an interview with startup incubator Y Combnator, which is famous for funding organizations like Doordash and Uber.
Nicholas’s introduction to Quarantunes came through social media. He found the organization through Chief of Staff Sage Leland’s Instagram story, and visited our website. In a similar way to noticing a problem with his high school peer tutoring center, he noticed an issue with scheduling on the website. He reached out to Julia with an offer to help integrate Tutorbook, and the rest is history.
While Quarantunes is making our shift to Tutorbook, we implore our families to check out all its amazing features. It is truly a labor of love and passion, and we are deeply grateful to Nicholas for his time and effort in making it everything it is now.
