At five in the afternoon, Rose-Hulman students are leaving class, trickling into the quad, the library, and the cafeteria.
A few are hauling backpacks to the basement of an academic building, settling down in cubicles with laptops and headsets.
It’s September 8th — the first full shift after summer break for tutors at AskRose. The free, student-run tutoring service is available for all Indiana teenagers who need help with math and science homework.
Senior Cole Fuchs is beginning his final year as a tutor and supervisor for AskRose.
“I really like the environment. I really get along with all my coworkers, the work, the staff here, and I like what I do,” Fuchs said. “It's nice being able to help out some students.”
His job is training new tutors and helping Indiana teens with homework.
“I certainly wish I would have known about AskRose when I was their age,” said Fuchs, a Greenfield, Ind. native. “It's nice sort of giving back and answering those questions that I sort of struggled with myself back in those days.”
It’s been this way for 35 years, since the call center had only two phones. It started as a service for students in Vigo and Clay County, in response to a request from the Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce.
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Thanks to a grant from Lilly Endowment, Ask-Rose now pays around 80 tutors to operate the hotline five hours a night, five nights a week. Students can reach out by calling 877-ASK-ROSE or visiting askrose.org.
Not just any student gets to work here, said Bernadette Ewen, chief director of student learning resources at Rose-Hulman.
“We have tutors that are Rose-Hulman students that have excelled in math and science and have been recommended by a professor,” she said. “Then they’ve been trained to be a tutor.”
Coaching teens over the phone, email and instant messaging takes intelligence but also intangible skills not usually associated with engineers: communication, empathy and patience.
“The idea is that we want the student to succeed,” Ewen said. “We encourage them along the way, and they can call or contact us as many times as they want.”
Senior Prithvi Vijay Krishnan said patience does not come naturally to him.
“I want to get things done fast. I want people to do them fast,” Vijay Krishnan said. “But I think while on calls and maybe chats as well, when you go through each and every step slowly with another student, that kind of patience develops.”
He uses the techniques he learned growing up in India to help Indiana students approach math and science problems from a new perspective.
“There's some students where it instantly works out, they know what's going on, it clicks instantly,” Vijay Krishnan said. “Then there's some students where you have to actually sit down, talk them through each and every step, guide them through it, and then see how they're doing.”
Learning math and science can feel like pulling teeth for some students. It’s difficult even for those inclined toward STEM.
“A lot of it comes down to understanding,” Fuchs said. “We are all engineers and in STEM here, we understand that it's very hard. We struggle every day with our materials. So when we have a student that's struggling with, say, algebra, yeah, we've already passed algebra, but we went through those struggles.”
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Ewen said since 1991, Ask Rose has had nearly 800,000 student contacts. Most are Indiana teens, but they get calls from Illinois and other states. Even students at Purdue University and firefighters studying for exams will call.
“But that doesn't mean that we won't answer it,” Ewen said. “Anybody who calls in, we're going to help.”
A lot has changed in 35 years. High schoolers now have access to AI chatbots which can walk them through assignments. But Ewen believes the hotline provides something different.
“You have someone who's looking at the problem, going step by step with you, and looking for that ‘aha’ moment,” she said. “I don't think you're going to get that out of AI.”
That moment is something tutors chase, and not only for the students they help.
“That was like a really proud moment for me,” Vijay Krishnan said. “I was like, okay, I can teach people something. That was amazing.”
