New physics and math help center is a modern addition to Phillips Hall

The dual Physics/Math Help Center opened its doors in Phillips Hall on Tuesday as a place for help and studying. The former electronics lab is open daily for students needing assistance in either of the two subjects.

Faculty members supervise while graduate students run the help center.

“The graduate students are very good, very knowledgeable, so each undergraduate student can then talk to one of the graduate students and they will help them out,” said Christian Iliadis, chairperson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Kevin Guskiewicz, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the funding came from a joint renovation project with the Biomedical Engineering lab in Phillips Hall.

“This center is highly used from the first day of class to the last day of class, of course the most popular times being right before finals and midterms,” Guskiewicz said. “It’s my job as the dean to make sure we are funding the graduate students to be able to support it and it’s a great opportunity for those grad students to get their teaching careers started with the one-on-one teaching they get to do here.”

Iliadis said the departments identified the current space as the best location for this help center because it was the most centrally located and closest to the entrance of Phillips Hall.

“There is no math or separate physics center, so it’s the math/physics help center. The idea is that these disciplines are so close together that it makes a lot of sense to run this center together,” he said.

“We decided to make a really nice space and get away from this attitude of ‘Yeah we can drag some surplus furniture in there,’ so we really wanted to make it a nice and appealing space so that the students feel comfortable in the help center.”

First-year math and physics major Eva Ramirez said the new center is a nice place to study in general.

“The old help center was kind of dull and I used to use it a lot because I was in Calc 1 and I really struggled, but I like this new help center because it’s bright, shiny and new,” Ramirez said.

Senior Associate Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics Chris Clemens said he told both department chairpeople to come up with a new help center that would be a place for students to actually use and would look better than the rest of Phillips Hall.

“I hope students will be able to find it and use it — that’s number one. I hope it will be a pleasant place to come instead of some of the rooms in Phillips that you’ve seen, and I really hope there will be no intimidation to come in and get help when people are struggling with their course assignments,” he said.

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