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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I have always wanted a tutorial ONLY environment for my future Physics study.

I believe I can grind through the textbooks by myself but I need some tutor, preferably a PHD to answer my batched questions and guide me through exercises I cannot figure out.

Do PHDs of good universities do this kind of things? What hourly rate should I expect?

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To grossly oversimplify, this is the teaching model of Oxford and Cambridge. The primary method of instruction is the tutorial/supervision, usualy one tutor to two undergrads.

Thanks, that's not feasible for me. I wonder if it's easy to find PHDs who are willing to do this. But I know good PHDs are generally very busy.

They can sometimes become less busy in the face of a sufficiently lucrative offer.

Yeah I'm trying to figure out a good price for both sides. I'll probably try locals first. We do have a couple of good universities -- definitely not MIT/Berkeley league but I don't need it.

There are one-to-one tutoring services that target university students, and I doubt they'd have any problem with a paying customer who wasn't a student. Some of them offer tutors who have PhDs.

From what I can find on Google, prices range from "affordable for a student" to "affordable for a student with rich parents if they only need a few hours".

This is how typical courses in eg physics are supposed to work. You read the material before a lecture, the lecture gets everyone on the same page and hopefully answers some or all of your questions, then you solidify by a) doing all the exercises and b) attending the tutorial and/or office hours to resolve questions you still have.

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