We use QueueStatus as our queuing system.
In CS103, office hours are a time to come and chat with the course staff about anything at all. The majority of students stopping by office hours are there with questions about the week’s problem set, and you are encouraged to swing by if you are stuck on a problem set question. It’s also completely reasonable to stop by to discuss course topics in general, whether that’s something that came up in the week’s lecture or something you read about online.
And of course, you’re also welcome to stop by to chat about anything and everything - course recommendations, career/life advice, cool hobbies or side projects you are working on - we are excited to get to know you over the course of the quarter!
How do Office Hours Work?
Typically, office hours operate on a queue model. You’ll sign up for help, and once a TA is free she’ll come over to chat with you. While you’re waiting, feel free to work on other problem set questions, read a book, etc.
Once you've arrived at office hours, sign up in the queue for help at QueueStatus. The TAs will then get to you once they're ready. Please use QueueStatus for both in-person and remote office hours; this enables us to better support students who are taking the class remotely or are in COVID isolation.
Sometimes, if lots of people have questions on the same topic (or same problem set question), we might organize an informal review session to explore that topic in more depth. That way, we can help out a bunch of people with related questions all at once.
Where and When are Office Hours?
We’ll post an office hours timetable on the course website. That calendar will include both location and time information, along with the names of the TAs who are running that office hours session. For office hours where the location is "Zoom", see the QueueStatus page for the Zoom link to join. Feel free to pick whatever time works best for you. If you’ve gotten to know the TAs, you can also specifically try to stop by the office hours of a TA you’ve had good experiences with in the past.
One piece of advice – office hours tend to fill up near problem set deadlines. If you attend office hours earlier in the week, you’ll typically have to wait much less than if you visit the last time slot before a problem set is due. (Yet another reason to start early!)
When Should I Ask for Help on Problem Sets?
For starters, it is perfectly reasonable to stop by office hours to ask questions about the week’s problem set. This is a normal part of taking the class and does not reflect on your intelligence, abilities, study habits, etc. Think of it this way: the topics we cover span include mathematical results spanning about 150 years, many of which were revolutionary (and controversial!) when they were first discovered. Some of what we’ll be covering was so controversial that it took decades for the general mathematical community to accept. So it’s completely normal over the course of the quarter to need to get help and advice from time to time.
That said, it’s important to strike the right balance between working through problems on your own and getting help from the course staff. If you never ask for help, you might find yourself spinning your wheels unproductively, struggling on a single problem for hours and hours on end. That’s not good from anyone’s perspective: we don’t want you struggling pointlessly, and you have a bunch of other things to do with your time. On the other hand, if you always ask for help whenever you encounter something you don’t understand, you won’t develop problem-solving and analytical skills we’re trying to teach you. After all, once you’re done with CS103, you won’t be able to swing by office hours every time you have a theory question. (And on a less lofty but potentially more pragmatic note: we won’t be able to help you in office hours when you’re taking our exams!)
In trying to find the golden mean between these two extremes, your goal is to make as much progress as you can on your own and to get help as soon as it’s clear that you won’t be able to continue without some input and advice.
There are no hard-and-fast rules about when you can or can’t ask for help on a problem set, but in general, if you’ve been working on one problem for two or more hours without success, you might want to come in to office hours to get help. Conversely, if you’ve been working on a problem for fewer than thirty minutes, you may want to spend more time on it before heading to office hours.
Another good test for whether you should come to office hours: if you’re stuck on something, write out everything you’ve done to try to “unstick” yourself. That could be reviewing related topics from lecture, drawing pictures, trying concrete examples, reading supplementary materials, etc. If there’s something you haven’t yet tried, give that a try first. If you’ve tried all of these strategies – or if for your particular situation you have no clue what to try – then it might be good to visit office hours.
What Kind of Help Can I Expect for Problem Sets?
Our goal in office hours is to teach you transferrable, general skills that will serve you well in the future, rather than just to help you complete a specific problem set question. Therefore, much of the help we’ll offer will consist of general problem-solving techniques. For example, we might ask you to go to a whiteboard and draw out your thought process as a diagram. We might ask you to work on a similar, easier problem to get you to engage with related concepts. We might ask you to compare your problem to one we did in lecture or that you’ve seen elsewhere on the problem sets. Or we might have ask you to talk through the approaches you’ve taken so far to see where you’re getting tripped up.
Because we’re focusing on general, transferrable skills, we won’t be able to read over your specific answers to the problem set questions to see whether they’re correct. Similarly, we won’t be able to just tell you how to solve the problem and leave you the task of writing things up.
How Should I Ask For Help on Problem Sets?
You’ve waited in the queue, and now the TA is ready to come chat with you about a problem set question. What should you do to make the most of the time you have?
Our advice is the following: articulate the specific issue you’re stuck on and tell us what you’ve tried so far to unstick yourself. To do so, before coming to office hours to get help, we recommend that you think through the following prompts to narrow things down.
First, what specifically are you having trouble with? Are you stuck because you don’t understand what the problem is asking you to do? Are you unsure whether you can assume some specific fact is true without having to first prove it? Do you have a proof that works in one case, but doesn’t work in other cases? Are you fundamentally unsure how some mathematical concept works? Are you unsure what a specific piece of notation means? The more specific you can be with what you’re stuck on, the better we’ll be able to help you out.
Second, what have you tried to do to unstick yourself? For example, if there’s some term you don’t recognize, what sources have you consulted to try to determine what it means? If you’re unsure how to prove something, have you tried setting up the general shape of the proof? If you aren’t sure why something is true, have you tried drawing pictures or working through concrete examples to spot a pattern? I would go so far as to recommend that, before you ask any question in office hours, you first write out a list of everything you’ve tried so far. If you are completely stuck and you have no idea what to try, that’s actually probably the real question you want to ask: “what do I do when I get stuck on a problem like this one?”
If you have good answers to these two questions, chances are that we’ll be able to help you more efficiently, both because you won’t have to listen to us telling you a bunch of things you already know and because we can more clearly listen to your thought processes. Often times, the best way for us to help is to point out a different perspective on a topic or to correct a misunderstanding, and the more you let us know how you’re thinking through things, the better we can do that.