Peddie News — Physics Center

I wrote a Peddie News article featuring the Physics Center.

Physics Center: Turning Magnitude into Vector

This year, the Physics Center established itself with a motto of turning magnitude into vector. The Physics Center attempts to put an efficient direction to the efforts Peddie students put into physics classes. In other words, it attempts to make studying physics easier and more accurate through the help of physics faculty and upperclassmen with successful experiences in physics classes.

Although there were various help hours individually offered by teachers from other classes, no centers were offered outside of English and mathematics. The Physics Center broke this tradition when Coco Zhou '26 and Jacob Kidd '26 first pitched the idea to Dr. Diehl, a physics teacher at Peddie.

Emphasizing the number of students who take physics classes, as well as the number of physics class sections, Zhou and Kidd advocated for the Center and established a recruiting system for other tutors as well. Currently, the physics teachers select and contact students with a high understanding of the class material and sufficient social skills to smoothly connect with and support other students.

If the students agree to serve as physics center tutors, they are then required to sign up for sessions to take charge of. Located in L14 in the Science Center, the sessions are held in a number of blank periods throughout the Peddie schedule, including conference periods on Mondays and Fridays, as well as DMX periods on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Either Zhou or Kidd are in every session with the tutors signed up to serve for that session.

Over the fall term, the Physics Center made huge progress, but there is still more work ahead. Dr. Diehl noted that "during the first trimester, at least 124 students have made use of the service," while observing that freshman participation remained below expectations despite recommendations from advisors and teachers.