Who is Dr Nerijus Sidorovas?

My Academic Journey

I have been studying Mathematics from GCSE through to A-Levels, undergraduate mathematics, and in 2025 I attain my PhD in Applied Mathematics. However, I was never a straight grade-A student at school, and I hope that my academic experience is an inspiration to those students who may be feeling demotivated.

Contrary to what people around me might say, I am by no means a natural at the subject. In my days as a GCSE student, maths was a subject which often eluded me because it was very easy to look at a given problem, decide that I do not understand it, and leave it alone.

This type of attitude is the downfall of many students, and does more harm than good in shaping the perception of the subject and appreciation for it.

In Year 10, I completed my GCSE Foundation Maths exam with flying colours and was placed onto the GCSE Higher Maths exam. While the foundation paper was an enjoyable experience without too much effort, the Higher content was quite a challenge! I lost a lot of motivation for the subject as a result, and my grade was as low as an E (i.e. grade 2 or 3 by today’s system). I soon realised that maths is not a subject that you can passively progress through, but motivation and willpower was a big drawback. Quite luckily, I had a great teacher at the time who was always enthusiastic about the subject, explained topics in a very clear manner, and provided as much assistance as I needed with great patience, no matter how slowly I was progressing. Slowly but surely, I gained my confidence back in the subject. I began investing more time into it by revising and practicing problems; even if I did not understand some of them, I still persevered and asked for help! This ultimately resulted in my grades improving, and this was arguably the biggest motivator — seeing all my hard work pay off.

With the rise of my grades, I was offered the opportunity to be put into the more able (top-set) class, so that I would be able to cover the more difficult content of the curriculum, hence allowing me to achieve higher grades. However, I declined this change, and I made this decision because in Year 8/9 I had been moved to an able class, but fell behind significantly as I felt a strong discontinuity in what I had learnt beforehand and the new material I was being taught. I declined so that this would not repeat.

Over the course of Year 10 and Year 11, with the help of my maths teacher, I found my interest in the subject once again, and my predicted grade eventually turned to a B grade (i.e grade 6). Indeed, unbeknownst to me, my interest had actually blossomed into a passion. At the time, it was all about keeping the momentum up and giving the Higher GCSE Maths exam the best shot I could. While I was not able to cover grade A* content, I was more than happy to keep my momentum going and walk away smiling with whatever grade I would get. On GCSE Results Day in August 2014, I had opened my results envelope to find out that I had achieved an A grade in GCSE Maths! This was certainly a great experience seeing all my work pay off, and I was blown away by the (somewhat) unexpected result given that I was many grades behind not that long ago.

By achieving grade-A at GCSE, I made the decision to swap one of my A-Level subjects in order to take up studying Further Mathematics alongside the normal Maths A-Level that I had picked as an option initially. This decision was a brave one, because I had merely scraped the grade-A in GCSE Maths, and typically FM candidates should have had a strong A or A* grade in GCSE Maths. However, as my GCSE teacher was also teaching both Maths and Further Maths A-Levels, and he had seen the effort and hard work that I had put into my GCSE Maths, he granted me the opportunity to study Maths and Further Maths at A-Level.

At first, the A-Levels proved to be quite a challenge, and understandably so because I had missed out on the high A / A* grade content at GCSE. However, by that point I was very invested in the subject. My determination is what allowed me to catch up to my peers over the months of Year 12, and it is what ultimately enabled me to achieve A* in Maths and B in Further Maths A-Levels. At the time I had no idea what the future looked like, but I had always found the prospect of constantly being engaged with mathematics in some capacity an interesting option.

With these A-Levels under my belt, I was set to sail into the undergraduate mathematics scene at Loughborough University. I found my degree thoroughly challenging in some aspects but ultimately enjoyable in most, and I have developed a wide variety of knowledge in the subject as a result, as well as gaining key teaching experience. My module grades have been mostly 70+, although there were struggles here and there, as is the norm. My highest grade was 98/100 in Vector Calculus, which I was blown away by so much that I went to have a look at my exam script to ensure it was marked properly! The lecturer of this module recognised my grade and in turn offered me a unique opportunity within the School of Science to work on a three month summer research project in 2018. It was in this project that I developed an interest in the field of nonlinear waves, and this area was the focus of my final year MMath project (result: 91%) which ended up constituting a basis for my PhD thesis. The same lecturer who had offered me the summer research opportunity ended up being my PhD supervisor.

I hope that my own journey acts a motivator to some. It shows that you do not need to be born with some magical spell granting you efficiency in the subject. You just need the right teacher to help guide you to your goals. The key approach to success in mathematics is to firstly cover the theory, ensure that it is understood, further ensure that worked examples to problems are understood, and then simply practice, practice, practice until the topic is mastered. Having a good teacher is important during such a process, and I take the responsibility of being a tutor very seriously to try and instil that same motivation into my students.

Further Tutoring Experience

As part of my academic journey, I decided to begin tutoring and help many struggling GCSE, A-Level, and Undergraduate students get to grips with their mathematics, and be confident that they are more than able to achieve the highest possible grade in their examinations. I value the flexibility, creativity, problem-solving aspects of the job, but the biggest reward is seeing someone’s abilities grow.

Throughout my own journey, I have taken upon numerous opportunities to tutor students of different abilities and help them get the grades they wish for.

Initially, in Year 12-13, I began as a non-profit tutor in my own school where I tutored Year 8-11 students during lunch breaks, and this involved boosting their confidence in the subject as well as providing new ways to approach problems and solve them. While this opportunity was not very long-term, the improvement of the students was clear-cut. Their algebra got much better over a short period of time, they started to think laterally about problems, and the topics which once haunted them were no longer an obstacle.

In summer of 2016, after some tutoring experience and after receiving my A-Level results, I decided to become a part-time tutor. In turn, I have signed up to several tutoring websites, and slowly began tutoring students in their own homes as well as online. These days, I work with many students on a weekly frequency over a long period of time, but also with many students who request short and rapid intervention.

In 2017, as a part-time tutor, I was granted two key opportunities; one of which was to work with an outreach programme titled ‘PATHWAYS Project’ run by a partnership of Leicestershire Universities. This involved being properly trained to be a tutor (involving aspects of safeguarding, teaching approaches, various scenario handling) before being sent off to tutor at two different secondary schools every week. The tutoring largely involved the same approach as before, but now I was able to build more rapport with my tutees, and I often created revision material tailored to the specific students which I tutored. At these schools, I often tutored a small group of students (2-4) which were identified by the schools to require the most improvement in the subject.
The second opportunity was ultimately the same, but run by Loughborough University closer to the exam season, whereby I was sent to help tutor larger groups of students as part of their final revision push before exams in the Swadlincote area.

Since then, I have actively engaged on mathematics forums, and tutoring students privately via certain websites (e.g. Tutorfair [now Superprof], and MyTutor), and this has all been in addition to the university undergraduate seminars I ran throughout my PhD.

All this has given me plenty of experience and teaching knowledge that I apply to every session I run. In total, I have tutored for over 5000 hours in the last few years. My teaching style has also been refined over this period, and I usually like to dedicate first sessions to building rapport with my tutees, discussing which topics they want to focus on, how confident they are at the beginning of tutoring, and then plan my lessons in advance accordingly. Every student is different, and I aim to be as adaptable and approachable as possible in this regard.