For the past several years, campus has been home to the Writing Center, an outlet for students to convene and work on their essays alongside trained writing assistants. Given Oberlin’s plethora of writing-intensive courses, this center has proved useful to students of all departments. However, what the College has in terms of writing assistance it severely lacks when it comes to assistance in quantitative proficiency — an issue that, until now, has gone unaddressed.

This year will be the first that students will be able to get support specifically focused on sciences and mathematics. College junior and computer science  major Eli Rose, who is a tutor in the Quantitative Skills Center, says that the center is necessary because “some people think of themselves as not being ‘math people’, or people see math as alien and difficult. Our purpose is to overcome that kind of idea and explain [it] to people in a way that makes it more intuitive.”

The idea for this new center was born when Oberlin College Associate Professor of Chemistry Jason Belitsky, Associate Professor of Biology Marta Laskowski, Dean Sean Decatur,and several other professors throughout Oberlin’s natural science departments convened to write a grant for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute last year, in which they delegated funds towards a quantitative skills center that would be able to supply students with tutoring services across the different math and science disciplines offered at the College.

According to Belitsky, although the Quantitative Skills Center is currently funded by the HHMI, there is “potential for it to be funded in other ways, or through other grants.” The Quantitative Skills Center will be the third resource center for tutoring on campus, in addition to the Writing Center and the digital arts mentorship program directed by Julie Cruse. Even before the Quantitative Skills Center was created, Oberlin still had a large individual tutoring program across many of its departments. The chemistry department has one of the largest student volunteer tutoring programs on campus.

“We have a tremendous amount of tutoring; the free one-on-one tutoring can’t possibly be beat,” said Belitsky. “Many of our [peer institutions] have quantitative skills centers, [but] our center is different [because] it is broad for all of the sciences. One of the things we are talking about a lot now is that we have all these different programs, we have discussed potentially having shared training and also just transparency in advertising making sure students know all these opportunities are available to them.”

The center is currently staffed with eleven tutors — all recommended by professors for this program — who represent seven different majors. All staff members have taken an array of introductory level science courses. As the center continues to expand, staff members will be hired based on expertise in whatever disciplines students visiting the center tend to find the most difficult.

Marcelo Vinces, who was hired by Oberlin in January and now works as the director of the Quantitative Skills Center, says that his goal for the center is “for students to become much more comfortable with quantitative skills that will be useful to them no matter what they end up doing, especially as we go into the 21st century. No Oberlin student will graduate with this idea that they can’t do math or computers; that’s the big idea. I want more retention in courses in the science and math and in the majors and better performance for students who lack the confidence in those skills.”