LLuvia with her company, STEM Discovery Tutoring, has been a Work Evolution member since 2014 and we've proudly watched her grow her business. She is a tremendous asset to our community and someone you should get to know, especially if you need help figuring out calculus and physics! When she isn't tutoring physics from her office at Work Evolution, you can catch her teaching Physics at LA City College. Here are five questions with Lluvia.

1) What's your line of work and why do you do what you do?
I teach physics and calculus to anyone who likes these subjects, is just interested, or is otherwise forced to know it.  I am especially interested in teaching to groups who would not otherwise have been exposed to physics and calculus and being a mentor to those who find that it is not only fun to learn, but even that they are quite talented!  My philosophy is simple:  Never stop learning.  Never stop teaching what you have learned.

2) What's your favorite type of project to work on? Have any examples?
Taking on new and different ways of looking at these subjects and their applications is a special joy.  This semester, I have had the good fortune of working with a student taking a BioMechanics course and we try to understand how, for example, to minimize the forces and torques on a particular set of ligaments after hip surgery. 

3) If someone gave you a million dollars, how would you spend it?
I would stay low key and keep doing my little tutoring business.  Then I'd surprise deserving students with scholarships to whatever university they are going to.  

4) Who's a bigger deal, Einstein or Newton? Explain your answer.
DEFINITELY Newton!  Newton is famous for his three laws of mechanics and inventing calculus.  Fewer people know that he also discovered the law of gravitation.  This was the beginning of physics as we know it.  The law of gravitation applies equally to celestial objects as well as things on earth.  The same mechanism that causes an apple fall from a tree causes the Earth to revolve around the sun.  We cannot imagine what a preposterous suggestion it would have seemed to the regular people of that time--when the heavens was considered the "perfect and immutable" place where God and the angels resided, while the Earth was flawed and full of imperfect humans.  Indeed, writing down the single law which explained motion on Earth and in the Heavens was the first great unification in physics.  Every physicist since then, even Einstein, has been trying to finish what Newton began--a unification theory for everything.  All that being said, Newton was a weirdo!  Einstein was much cooler.  :)

5) What do you like most about being a Work Evolution member?
Before Work Evolution, I wasn't really encouraged to follow my dream of owning my own tutoring business.  Here I have found the encouragement and support to do it.  I have also found the room to grow and expand beyond what I thought was possible.  Work Evolution makes that dream you have in the backof your head that you try to repress for the sake of not taking risks, out into the light, where it can grow and flourish.  Flesh it out until it's viable.  Then realize it.  Plus all the free coffee!!