Office Hours/Contact

Review hours vs. Walk-in hours

Because this course is large, many of you will likely ask the same questions. We cannot possibly answer those questions individually for everyone...and more importantly, your peers might be able to help you answer questions for yourselves. To that end, we are designating some office hours every day for group review. The TAs for those office hours will look at the questions asked on Piazza (see below) during the past day, organize them, and lead a group discussion to answer them collaboratively. Once these group review hours are over, they will post to Piazza a summary of the discussion.

If you cannot make it to these review hours, there will still be plenty of office hours where tutors will take walk-in questions. However, it is your responsibility to check Piazza first: if your question has already been answered, the tutors will not answer it again.

Additionally, tutors are not there to walk you through every step of the problem. If you have not been following the design recipe and cannot explain the work you’ve done before coming to tutors, they are allowed to tell you to go back and work on the problem on your own first, before asking for help.

Weekly calendar

Here is a calendar of all the office hours that the course staff offer. If you would like to speak to an instructor and you cannot make it to their office hours, send an email to set up a meeting. If you have a general question and cannot make it to anyone’s office hours, post to Piazza (see below).

For the most part, office hours are in 102 WVH or 108 WVH, and staff members will have the same office hours every week. Before going to someone’s hours, check where they will be on the calendar below. Should there be a change to someone’s hours, there will be a post on Piazza and the calendar will be updated.

Piazza

Piazza is an on-line forum for class discussions. Anybody can post a question and anybody else can reply.

Before posting, check whether or not your question has already been asked. If it already has been asked and has not yet been answered, provided the question is not more than a day old, it likely will be answered soon. Do not double post.

Posting any parts of a solution to any parts of a homework assignment is considered cheating. You don’t want to do this. Limit your answers to other students to providing clarity when needed and hints when appropriate. This is good practice should you ever want to be a tutor :)

Note: anonymity on Piazza is implemented to make you anonymous to students but not to staff members.

Staff

Email

When you need help with the lecture material, the lab material, or the problem sets, don’t despair—there are plenty of ways to get help.

A meeting with a tutor, TA, or instructor is the best to get explanations because you can ask questions in real time and get answers to them.

If you have a question that you prefer to ask in a non-public setting, feel free to send email to anybody on the course staff.

Note that we may post anonymous excerpts from your mail message on the blog if we consider it of general interest. If you want the message to remain completely private, be sure to request it when you send an email.