President's Report Masthead
September 30, 2014

Department of Mathematics has a new home

The Department of Mathematical Sciences completed its move to Old Whitney Hall in August, in time for the beginning of the fall semester.

The move is an upgrade for the department in terms of space, and allows everyone to be housed under one roof, including doctoral students, said Anton Schick, professor and department chair. “We work with our PhD students one-on-one and it’s nice to have them close by and in appropriate spaces,” he said. “And we also now have an in-house calculus center and more help rooms.”

The building provides sufficient space for a department of 24 current tenure-track/tenured faculty, seven postdocs, 19 adjuncts, a newly hired director of calculus and two assistant directors, two secretaries, one IT staff member and over 60 graduate students. The department now has room to grow as well, Schick said, and will be conducting searches for three hires for next year. A proposal is also moving forward to offer a master’s degree in applied statistics.

“It’s very positive,” said Schick about the move, adding that offices are larger in the new location, making it more comfortable overall and including ample room to meet with several students at the same time.

In addition to faculty and graduate student offices, the department owns a classroom and two seminar rooms – allowing all graduate courses, seminars, colloquia and some upper-level undergraduate courses to be held in the building. There are also several common rooms for faculty and/or students to meet in. The department also has priority seating for two more classrooms in the building, allowing it to offer more undergraduate courses in proximity to faculty offices.

Schick said there are five help rooms where graduate students offer specialized assistance to undergraduates, and a calculus center where students can take individualized skills exams in a controlled environment. To support the calculus testing center and the computational needs of the entire department, the building houses a departmentally run server room.

Schick credited the department staff, Marge Pratt, Carol Nedlik and Jeff Nye, for extraordinary service in connection with the move, and also commended the faculty for using the opportunity to better organize their offices and other departmental spaces to better serve the needs of students.