Nass­er Khan

Qual­i­fied ac­coun­tant Nicholas Gomez has switched gears in his pro­fes­sion­al life and has now found his true call­ing, that of a tu­tor.How does one go from be­ing a part­ner and coun­try man­ag­er at a ma­jor ac­count­ing firm to be­com­ing an ac­count­ing tu­tor? That was the big ques­tion Get­ting Per­son­al was ea­ger to ask Gomez who has tak­en a leap in­to the world of ed­u­ca­tion, teach­ing the youth of our na­tion a sub­ject where on av­er­age, ac­cord­ing to him, two-thirds of the 24,000 CXC stu­dents do not suc­ceed.

His ex­pe­ri­ence at vol­un­teer teach­ing on Sat­ur­days over the past three years at St Fin­bars RC Church, Diego Mar­tin, along­side his wife "Aun­ty Liz," a pro­fes­sion­al hair­dress­er and oth­ers was what pro­pelled Gomez to leap full-time in­to the world of pri­vate tu­tor­ing.

In fact, Gomez ac­knowl­edges that the love for teach­ing and men­tor­ing was iden­ti­fied from a young age since he was giv­en the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to cap­tain many of the crick­et teams at Fa­ti­ma Col­lege (Un­der-14, 16 and 19), fol­lowed by the T&T U-19 crick­et team in 1984.

At the age of 19, Gomez chose to pro­vide math and ac­count­ing lessons to Form Five stu­dents. It was these ex­pe­ri­ences that shaped his pas­sion for teach­ing and men­tor­ing young peo­ple.

A tal­ent­ed and as­pir­ing crick­eter who reached as far as rep­re­sent­ing the cham­pi­onship-win­ning Queen's Park Crick­et Club team and rep­re­sent­ing T&T along­side his friend Bri­an Lara, he made the biggest de­ci­sion in his life in 1986 to stop play­ing the sport he loved so much, fol­low­ing his on­ly ap­pear­ance in first-class crick­et–T&T ver­sus Eng­land in the Queen's Park Oval, to fo­cus on his aca­d­e­m­ic and ac­count­ing ca­reer, one that was to give the 50-year-old his 25-year base to now em­bark up­on his new ca­reer as a tu­tor.

This has led Gomez and his part­ners Scott Hilton-Clarke and Paul Ryan Perkins to set up their new com­pa­nies–Ex­am Gu­ru and the Light Bulb at a cut­ting-edge fa­cil­i­ty de­signed and built by Perkins, now open at Bay Road in St James. The pur­pose of Ex­am Gu­ru and the Light Bulb is to trans­form the ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence of the youth in our com­mu­ni­ties in­clud­ing the Caribbean re­gion. Gomez is a fel­low of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Char­tered Cer­ti­fied Ac­coun­tants (FC­CA) of the UK, a mem­ber of the In­sti­tute of Char­tered Ac­coun­tants of T&T (ICATT) and al­so of Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica. He sits on the boards of He­roes Foun­da­tion and the Foun­da­tion for the En­hance­ment and En­rich­ment of Lives, and he is a mem­ber of the Cab­i­net-ap­point­ed com­mit­tee to re­view and as­sess the per­for­mance and op­er­a­tions of whol­ly-owned state en­ter­pris­es and TSTT.

Q: Tell us a bit about your ear­ly years: where were you born, grew up and at­tained your var­i­ous lev­els of ed­u­ca­tion, in­clud­ing pri­ma­ry?

A: Born and grew up in Wood­brook, at­tend­ed Holy Name Prep pri­ma­ry school fol­lowed by Fa­ti­ma Col­lege. In my pur­suit of the AC­CA ac­count­ing qual­i­fi­ca­tion I at­tend­ed var­i­ous in­sti­tu­tions–Her­man Mar­cano and SAC in Trinidad, and Emile Woolfe in Lon­don.

What was the mo­ti­vat­ing fac­tor in start­ing and be­ing so pas­sion­ate­ly in­volved with this tu­tor­ing ven­ture?

Hav­ing missed a lot of school due to a med­ical con­di­tion, spondy­lolis­the­sis, which I was di­ag­nosed with in Low­er Form Six while play­ing crick­et led even­tu­al­ly to my in­ter­est in tu­tor­ing. The time I missed at school meant up­on my re­turn that I had to switch one of my A-Lev­el sub­jects, from physics to eco­nom­ics...this was more than an eye open­er as I was con­front­ed with this huge text book, a text that re­mind­ed me of a vol­ume of the En­cy­clopae­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca!

How was I go­ing to ex­tract the salient and per­ti­nent points from this 'en­cy­clopae­dia' and cap­ture it in a form to al­low for easy re­vi­sion when ex­ams are ap­proach­ing. In that mo­ment I said to my­self, I need­ed to find a way to be in ser­vice of stu­dents who face a sim­i­lar dilem­ma as I was fac­ing to help shape an ef­fec­tive so­lu­tion. I pur­sued a so­lu­tion. I found two text­books writ­ten by Japan­ese au­thors, the per­fect so­lu­tion–one in mi­cro and the oth­er in macro eco­nom­ics–these books were con­cise, di­a­gram­mat­ic, cov­ered the A-Lev­el syl­labus and easy to com­pre­hend.

Lat­er, when I left Fa­ti­ma Col­lege, I pro­vid­ed tu­tor­ing in math and ac­count­ing to Form Five stu­dents. It was re­mark­ably ful­fill­ing to see the "light bulb" go off in the stu­dents' eyes and say, "'yes, I now un­der­stand, thanks!'" En­joy­ing the in­ter­ac­tion with and men­tor­ing younger teenagers from back then left that yearn­ing to make a dif­fer­ence, so here we are to­day!

What do you at­tribute to the low pass­ing rate in ac­count­ing and how can we/you ad­dress this de­fi­cien­cy?

This is a com­plex mat­ter. What we have to con­front is that the very low pass rate in ac­count­ing is very sim­i­lar to the low pass rates in many CXC, CSEC sub­jects in­clud­ing math­e­mat­ics and busi­ness, to name a cou­ple, across the re­gion. As an ex­am­ple, I have re­viewed the pub­li­ca­tion of the CXC, CSEC re­sults in the Caribbean re­gion on their web­site and note sev­er­al years where 60 per cent of the 90,000-plus stu­dents fail math­e­mat­ics.

I won­der how many stu­dents get less than five pass­es and how many get ze­ro pass­es. These stats are not pub­lished. The re­sults tell us that the cur­rent ed­u­ca­tion­al of­fer­ings are not ad­e­quate­ly re­spon­sive to our cur­rent so­ci­etal needs. The ap­proach of pro­vid­ing a seat for every stu­dent is sim­ply not an ef­fec­tive so­lu­tion. We be­lieve there is a se­vere wan­ing of en­gage­ment be­tween stu­dent and teacher and that teach­ing, for many, is no longer em­braced as a vo­ca­tion but as a job. These two fac­tors need to be ef­fec­tive­ly con­sid­ered, con­front­ed and ad­dressed.

Do we ful­ly ap­pre­ci­ate and un­der­stand the im­pact on a young per­son who leaves school with few to no pass­es in their CSEC ex­am­i­na­tions?

I be­lieve there is a low self-es­teem and low self-con­fi­dence cri­sis in our na­tion and re­gion. Ed­u­ca­tion is a gift for all of us, and it is re­al­ly un­for­tu­nate that the ed­u­ca­tion­al of­fer­ings we have in place are not ad­e­quate­ly en­gag­ing and em­brac­ing to as­sure that there is an equal op­por­tu­ni­ty for all to ben­e­fit. Think about our cur­rent state: young kids at the age of eight are put on a tread­mill in pri­ma­ry school to learn to score high­ly in the SEA ex­am­i­na­tions.

They are 'forced' to mem­o­rise, 'forced' to re­gur­gi­tate, a pres­sure pot re­al­ly...all with the ob­jec­tive of scor­ing high­ly in the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion to give them an op­por­tu­ni­ty to get in­to a 'top' sec­ondary school. Have we asked how many top sec­ondary schools do we re­al­ly have in our re­gion and na­tion to­day? There­fore, what hap­pens to the many kids who are not placed in top sec­ondary schools? What are their chances to se­cure a sol­id well-round­ed ed­u­ca­tion? What are their chances to build self-con­fi­dence and high self-es­teem?

I asked my­self what if we were able to cre­ate a so­lu­tion where the best teach­ers/ed­u­ca­tors in our re­gion could reach more than 200 kids in any giv­en year? Is that pos­si­ble? How can that be ac­com­plished? The pur­pose of Ex­am Gu­ru and the Light Bulb is to trans­form the ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence of the youth in our com­mu­ni­ties. We are ex­plor­ing this on three fronts–the phys­i­cal, the in­tel­lec­tu­al and the emo­tion­al.

Phys­i­cal–es­tab­lish a place that is cut­ting edge, in­no­v­a­tive, very com­fort­able, and a place of high en­er­gy. In­tel­lec­tu­al–to pro­vide tu­tor­ing in a fun, in­spir­ing, en­er­getic way us­ing lead­ing edge tech­nol­o­gy and ed­u­ca­tion­al tools through tu­tors who are the most qual­i­fied, in­spired and en­gaged. Emo­tion­al–to pro­vide an en­vi­ron­ment where stu­dents feel sup­port­ed, em­braced and en­cour­aged to per­form at their op­ti­mal lev­els.

What is the most preva­lent mis­con­cep­tion about pri­vate lessons?

It is in­ter­est­ing that this has been a grow­ing in­dus­try in T&T. That speaks to the cur­rent of­fer­ings not be­ing ad­e­quate­ly re­spon­sive to stu­dents' needs. There is a view that teach­ers don't pro­vide the req­ui­site learn­ing with­in the school day and of­fer pri­vate lessons as a means of sup­ple­ment­ing their in­come. Is this a cyn­i­cal view or is there some truth to this? I can­not con­clude. What is ev­i­dent though is that pri­vate tu­tor­ing has be­come nec­es­sary to pre­pare and sup­port stu­dents to per­form well in their ex­am­i­na­tions.

What would you say and what ad­vice would you give to any­one con­tem­plat­ing a vo­ca­tion such as yours?

Teach­ing is a vo­ca­tion and I am eter­nal­ly grate­ful and thank­ful to all those teach­ers who sup­port­ed me in my life, in­clud­ing specif­i­cal­ly Mr Clive Pan­tin and Mr Har­ry Ram­dass–they pro­vid­ed me with the foun­da­tion and a chance to pur­sue many of life's in­fi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties. Great teach­ers in­flu­ence and in­spire great­ness in stu­dents. This is in­deed a vo­ca­tion, one that has been call­ing me for some time, and I have now had the courage to step in­side of it. Since do­ing so, sev­er­al peo­ple have ap­proached me to of­fer them­selves to tu­tor in sev­er­al sub­ject ar­eas. What if we have those with sig­nif­i­cant in­dus­try and busi­ness ex­pe­ri­ence to­geth­er with a pas­sion to im­part and share knowl­edge, step in­to the world with en­er­gy to tu­tor our youth. Ex­am Gu­ru will pro­vide sub­ject mat­ter–gu­rus who have such a call­ing.

What ad­vice would you give to the young peo­ple of T&T?

You are the fu­ture. Each of you has a gift giv­en by Almighty God so you owe it to your­self and to God to find that gift and to pur­sue it to the fullest. Of­ten it is that very gift that is the foun­da­tion of our pur­pose in life. Muster the courage, take that leap of faith and step in­side of it and give it all that you have. You will find ful­fil­ment, love, joy, and hap­pi­ness.

What dai­ly mot­to/cre­do do you live by and in three words, your recipe for suc­cess?

Casey Kasem, the fa­mous Amer­i­can disc jock­ey, coined this phrase which I em­braced as a teenag­er: "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reach­ing for the stars." Pur­sue your dreams!

If some­one on­ly reads a cou­ple lines of this in­ter­view what would you want them to know?

The youth are our fu­ture. Their ed­u­ca­tion and de­vel­op­ment is of para­mount im­por­tance. We need to trans­form our ed­u­ca­tion­al of­fer­ings to in­spire great­ness, self-es­teem and self-con­fi­dence in all of our youth.

What oth­er in­for­ma­tion about Ex­am Gu­ru and the Light Bulb would you like to share with our read­ers...con­tact in­fo, so­cial me­dia, up­com­ing events/open house etc?

Vis­it us at the fa­cil­i­ty and chat with us on your spe­cif­ic cir­cum­stances and needs. Face­book: The Light bulb, Ex­am Gu­ru; Phone: 235-BULB, 235-GU­RU; Ad­dress: 26 Bay Road, St James; Up­com­ing events: Open House–Youth and Par­ents–3-6 pm on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2016, at the Light Bulb.

De­scribe your­self in two words, one be­gin­ning with N, the oth­er with G, the ini­tials of your name.

Nur­tur­ing, Guid­ing.