About Doug McLemore & IcosaPrep
I started life in the Upper Midwest being born and raised in Southwest Michigan. I went to undergrad at Central Michigan University for Biology, Chemistry, and Physics, did some research at Andrews University and the University of Notre Dame, and finally grad school at Colorado State University for Chemistry and Adult Education (where I started, but never finished, a PhD and MEd). As an undergrad I was lucky to have diverse interests and was one of two primary observers of a 1.1-pound meteorite impact which I got to help analyze while part of my astronomy class in 1994. I contemplated attending grad school to study vertebrate paleontology or astrophysics but settled on continuing my education in chemistry. Right there you can see then I didn’t know, and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up 😉.
Did you know my first teaching experience came while I was still in high school? I coached our middle school MathCounts team and that started my life of teaching, and coaching. As an undergrad, I was a Chemistry TA and an American Sign Language TA, although my ASL is pretty rough these days, and I need to work on that. Right away in grade school, I took to TA-ing Chemistry labs like a fish to water. In fact, it led to me developing and running the upper division lab program for the Chemistry department at CSU until I left there in 2008. I still miss working with Chemistry majors and helping them develop their lab skills to head off to graduate school or into the workforce. Something that starts happening when you get older is you end up running into your former students as full-fledged professors years later when you move to California!
After school I spent time working at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington and teaching Astronomy and Chemistry at Front Range Community College and Colorado State University. It was at CSU I taught my first MCAT class. I was given a book and a schedule and told, “have at it.” Needless to say, the first class didn’t go well, but I learned I enjoyed helping students tackle this test head on. This is what took me to Texas, Louisiana, and Ohio in various capacities teaching and developing for standardized tests (ACT, SAT, GRE, DAT, OAT, PCAT, MCAT, and beyond) with The Princeton Review and MasteryPrep. In 2018, I relocated to California and struck out on my own as a private tutor and started working for UC Davis as a Health Professions Advisor and Test Prep Specialist.
All in all, you can see in the map below, I have been a bit of a rolling stone. I’ve now lived in 8 states and, not shown on the map, 1 province (I lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for about a year and a half total). I have also visited all of the contiguous 48 states, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Europe (primarily Germanic countries) in my travels and enjoy the diversity and uniqueness of every place I’ve been.
OK, now that the formalities are out of the way, here’s what truly makes me who I am! 😝 I discovered I was neurodivergent when I was in my 30s and finally learned to embrace all of various interests and no longer hide them. I love collecting things (coins, stamps, trading cards, penguins, calculators…). My favorite collection by far is my Lego collection. I had my adult Lego renaissance (I’m now an official AFOL) while driving through Nebraska. I stopped for break and ended up buying 7130 Snowspeeder (shown below). Now my collection has grown to take up a whole room in my house. I included a view of my shelves as well as my current project… The SitComPlex. It is the amalgamation of all of the Sit-Com Lego sets that have been released so far (Central Perk, Friends’ Apartments, Seinfeld’s Apartment, Bro Thor’s Penthouse, The Fab Five Lot, Sesame Street, The Big Bang Theory, The Office, and soon to contain the recent BTS set as a discotheque floor). I displayed at my first Con in November 2022 (Brickpalooza). Right after that I felt the inspiration and started a completely original MOC (my own creation): a mini-fig scale pirate ship. It still needs sails and rigging, but it’s almost done!
My other main hobby is music. I have played percussion (there’s more than just drums) since I was in fourth grade. I have played professionally in bands and orchestras in college and grad school and with a big band jazz band while I was living in Colorado (I just found out our band leader passed away ☹️). Now I play for enjoyment and with community bands from time to time. COVID really put a damper on the availability and quality of those types of volunteer groups, but I am starting to get back out there now that things are getting back to a new normal. I do some recording in my music room from time to time and, yes, that is a didgeridoo leaning up against my MalletKat.
Another aspect of teaching and coaching I’ve experienced is working with individual students and percussion sections at schools as a percussion teacher/coach. I have a lot of fond memories of teaching kids to embrace the power of rhythm and control to help them and their bands to come together as a unit and put on one heck of a show!
And who can forget my two fur babies? You can see Joshua lounging in his dog bed and Jessica guarding my insanely RGB computer. They come from a long line of black dog rescues. Josh is from Austin, TX and Jess is from Baton Rouge, LA. And here’s a wild story… I recently had a sarcoma removed from Jessica’s hip and in the process of getting X-rays to look for metastasis, we discovered she had been shot long before I got her with a shotgun. This is why I will ALWAYS adopt my dogs. No dog deserves to be treated so poorly and then dumped in a shelter. Did you know black dogs and cats don’t get adopted at the same rates as other animals?
At some point working with me, you will meet both of them. They are as much a part of my process as the content, skills, and strategies. You just can’t help but smile with the serotonin release that a goofy dog face in the camera will give you.
Sometime during the early 2010s, the idea of IcosaPrep was born. My love of steps being built into my study plans and an affinity for polyhedral dice (via years of playing Dungeons and Dragons) lead to my idea of 20-step study guides came to be. I have been writing and will release a series of General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, General Biology, and General Physics primers each touting 20 steps to mastery. Alongside of this work, I began to tire with the one-size-fits-all mentality I had come to know in the commercial standardized test prep world. I just knew there had to be a different way than hours or classes and tutoring packages targeted at the lowest common denominator; it just seemed like a one-size-fits-nobody result. I started to develop learning strategies and test-taking skills based in science (I just knew that stint in Adult Education would come in handy).
I continued to build on these ideas, and in 2020, I helped develop and implement a novel test prep program for the UC Davis Health Professions Post Baccalaureate Certificate Program under the supervision of Joanne Snapp (who is now a peer in business for herself as My Honest Advisor). I am now working with the third cohort of students in that program, and I am happy to say the first cohort has been well accepted into nursing, dental, veterinary, and medical school, and the second cohort has outperformed the first on their standardized tests. I have since started working with the postbac program at Shoreline Community College in Seattle and I am working on relationships with several more postbac programs on the West Coast as well.
I am grateful for all my success as I move IcosaPrep into the future. I am now working on developing and releasing classes to help students not only with test prep skills, but also with fundamental skills like reading comprehension, time management, study skills, and many others to come. I hope I can meet you where you are and help you move forward in your endeavors now and in the future!