Because I am aiming to provide the best experience for both tutors and students, I’ll require a short meeting with me before I start directing students towards you or listing your profile on my website.

In this meeting I’ll simply talk with you just to meet you and make sure that you have everyone’s best intentions in mind, and are a good, empathetic person who I think will be a good match for prospective students. I’m simply trying to make sure that everyone who tutors through my website is a good person who knows what they are doing.

It costs nothing to list your profile. Hopefully as the website grows, there’s enough traffic that the number of students dramatically increases, but again, it costs nothing to list your profile!

My plan is to give students two options for signing up for a tutor, either by filling out a form that will cause me to find a match for them (in which I’ll contact you), or the (probably) much more common way, allowing them to sort through the various tutors on the site and pick whichever one matches their needs the best.

Common things that I’ll want you to include are:

• Your MCAT Score (and breakdown)

• General Availability

• Price Range per Hour

• Other interesting things about yourself (like if you have a cat, how many countries you’ve been to, just anything to help distinguish yourself from others)

My current plan for connecting tutors with students is having the students answer a short quiz that will match them with all of the tutors that are within their price range and are capable of helping them in the ways that they need, where they will then be able to immediately book you from there.

If you work as a contractor for MCATalyst, you can work whenever you want for however much you want. I will make no restrictions on either end. It’s totally up to you! You’ll have a larger number of inquiries if your price range is lower but may be able to work less hours if your price is higher.

I recommend reading the next section about how payouts work before picking your rate.

As a contractor, all payments will go through the website's payment processor (currently PayPal), where I will send payouts weekly. If you agree to tutor with me, there will be a mutually binding legal agreement basically stating that I have the responsibility to ensure that all money that you receive ends up in your account as agreed, so you’ll be protected! Some people are choosing to use my service simply because they don’t want to deal with payment software!

Deductions from your hourly rate (all in USD):

• Fees for students who book using a credit card: 2.9% of your hourly + $0.30. This is dictated by Acuity and PayPal, not me, I have no way of preventing this from immediately being deducted from your hourly.

• MCATalyst operational fee, which is dependent on your hourly rate (I know it’s annoying but see my comment below on why I need to take this out of your hourly!)

  • Under $35/hour: $2/hour in operational fees

  • $35-50/hour: $3/hour in operational fees

  • $50-65/hour: $4.25/hour in operational fees

  • $65-85/hour: $5.25/hour in operational fees

  • Above $85/hour: $6.50/hour in operational fees

  • How I calculate this on my end: Acuity tells me exactly how many hours you had scheduled as well as how much you got paid. I’ll take the hourly rate of what you got paid, take my cut to put towards the website expenses, and schedule a payout tentative to an agreed upon payout schedule. You will receive a breakdown of how much you earned as well as how much I took in operational fees so you can ensure that you’re getting exactly what you’re supposed to be getting.

Why I have to take out operational fees: running a website (and a business) is expensive! This is a registered business (as it has to be in order for me to contract other individuals) that I do advertise for, as such there are a lot of overhead fees that I’m paying right now.

The advantage of this is that as the website grows and as more tutors/students utilize it, the fees go down!

If you’re located in Canada, that’s not a problem at all! Since you’re simply a contractor of MCATalyst and not an employee, we don’t have to worry about work visas or anything like that.

The only complication is avoiding any conversion fees. I am currently working on setting this up, but as it stands, we don’t have to worry about the roughly 3% transaction fee when converting from USD to CAD because I am manually taking payments from students of Canadian tutors. This doesn’t change anything on your end, just allows me to force payments being taken in CAD and given back to you in CAD, never converted to USD.

This process will eventually be automated like it is for American tutors!