Ec Question Center Still on Lookout for Students

Two undergraduates sat in an otherwise empty Lamont Library classroom. Buzzwords from earlier sections remained scrawled and smudged on the blackboard: “outlier,” “sufficient data,” “confounding variables,” “robustness.”

It was 7:05 p.m. on Tuesday, and the Economics Question Center was not hopping with p-setters.

One of the two students was Connor A. Denney ’15, the EQC peer tutor on duty. The other student was Denney’s friend, who does not take any classes in the Economics department.

“There’s going to be a lot more people coming by later in the semester,” Denney said. “This is only my second day working.”

The EQC, which debuted without much traffic last semester, was designed to serve as a central hub for tutoring in select foundational economics courses. Open Sunday through Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m., the EQC offers students “additional help on homework questions and tricky economics concepts,” according to its website.

The EQC’s courses of instruction include Economics 1010: “Intermediate Microeconomics,” Economics 1011: “Intermediate Microeconomics: Advanced,” Economics 1123: “Introduction to Econometrics,” and Economics 1126: “Quantitative Methods in Economics.”

Trent A. Nelson ’16, one of the center’s student founders, had not responded to a request for comment as of Thursday afternoon.

A little later into the evening on Tuesday, Seth A.G. Brand ’19 arrived at the EQC, questions for Denney in tow. “Do you guys get a lot of people?” Brand asked. “Do you know if the third problem set is up?”

Brand said he found the EQC by looking online and wanted to “come and try it out.”

“I’m here because I thought the [Ec 1010] questions would be up,” he said. And when Brand and Denney discovered that the questions had not been posted, Brand added, “I think I’m going to go to the Writing Center.”

—Staff writer Melissa C. Rodman can be reached at melissa.rodman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @melissa_rodman.