All teaching assistants are required to hold office hours weekly until the last day of courses. Trivially, I am no exception to this rule. It is vital to know that I am also an undergraduate student like yourselves, meaning I am enrolled in plenty of courses during the semester and so my time is limited. I try my best to make time to be readily available to students. Below you can find a google calendar with my office hours listed on them. To the right of/below that is the 1004 calendar for other teaching assistants.

Traditionally, my office hours have tended to be some of the more packed ones among the teaching staff, however several factors influence how busy office hours are. Firstly is when I hold my office hours, picking a time in the middle of the day can be both good or bad depending on how everyone else's schedules are. Another factor would be how close we are to a homework deadline. I am anticipating Professor Cannon to make homeworks due on Friday after the lectures for the given week. This would mean that Thursdays may be busier than Tuesdays.

Tips for Office Hours

In order to make the most of your experience with office hours here are some helpful tips that would be good to know.

1. Be Familiar With Lecture Material

This does not mean you need to have completely understood what was shown in lecture, but you should be able to recall the concept itself if I asked. For example assuming you had covered Binary Search, you should be prepared to answer "What is Binary Search?" need not worry about questions like "How can we prove the complexity of Binary Search?". Assuming you missed lecture, then I would advise skimming the lecture notes I post on the homepage where the schedule is.

2. Arrive as Early as Possible to Office Hours

The early bird gets the worm. The earlier you get to Office hours the higher the probability that you will have your question(s) answered in a timely manner.

3. Do not Expect the Teaching Staff to Write your Code for You

Generally, it is bad practice for any member of the teaching staff to touch and write code on your machine. The main exception being that there is an extensive, nontrivial bug that requires relatively focused debugging. Along with this, you shouldn't go to office hours expecting solutions to the problem sets. The expectation from office hours is that you better understand the concepts necessary to complete the homework rather than the specifics needed solely for that particular homework.

4. Collaborate with your Classmates

You are encourage to talk to those next to you to help each other out, iron sharpens iron. The person next to you might have the answer to whatever you are stuck on so it never hurts to ask. If you are curious about what boundaries exist when it comes to academic honesty, please review the course policies.

5. Make Use of ED Discussion

If you have a question that does not require extensive debugging and is more related to course material and course logistics, please make a public post on the discussion platform accessible via courseworks, you have the option to make your post anonymous if you do not wish for your name to be made public as well.