Office Hours

In general office hours will be held in person, on campus. If you need to meet outside these hours, or if you need to schedule an online office hour due to illness, send an email to course staff to schedule an appointment.

Name	Contact	Office Hours (all times are in Waterloo - EST/EDT)
Caroline Kierstead (Instructor)	ctkierst@uwaterloo.ca	M 2:30-4pm (in-person DC3127) or by appointment. Please email for an appointment, which can be either online or in-person.
Brad Lushman (Instructor)	bmlushma@uwaterloo.ca	TTh 1:30-2:20pm (in-person DC 3110)
Mark Petrick (Instructor)	mdtpetri@uwaterloo.ca	M 11:45am-2pm (in-person DC 3109)
William Kang (ISA)	cs246@uwaterloo.ca	F 2-4pm (in-person MC 4065)
Luna Xin (ISA)	cs246@uwaterloo.ca	T 2:30-4:30pm (in-person MC 4065)
Evan Girardin (part-time ISA)	egirardin@uwaterloo.ca	F 9am-noon (in-person MC 4065)
Anton Ryavkin(part-time ISA)	aryavkin@uwaterloo.ca	T 9am-noon (iin-person MC 4065)

Office hours by day:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Mark 11:45am-2:00pm (in-person) Caroline 2:30-4pm (in-person)	Anton 9am-noon (in-person) Brad 1:30-2:20pm (in-person) Luna 2:30-4:30pm (in-person)		Brad 1:30-2:20pm (in-person)	Evan 9am-noon (in-person) William 2-4pm (in-person)

Outside of office hours, you can post a question on CS246 Piazza.

For general questions, please use Piazza so that other students with the same/similar questions can see the response. Please use office hours for questions involving assignments, going over your code, or anything that shouldn't be publicly posted on Piazza.

Be Prepared For Office Hours

We find that many students try to use office hours as a chance to debug their code. That is NOT the main purpose of office hours. One of the goals of this course is to get you to become a programmer that can debug code on your own. Given how long it can sometimes take to debug code (especially code that course staff have never seen before), we simply do not have enough time to debug code for everyone during office hours. You are expected to spend a considerable amount of time attempting to debug your own code and using office hours as a last resort. If you come to office hours for code debugging, you will be expected to explain what debugging process you've already done.

Rule of thumb: Come to office hours with a specific question.
Your question during office hours shouldn't be "Can you help debug my code?", it should be something specific like "Line XX of code is causing an error. What is wrong with line XX of code?".

CS Consulting Centre - MC 4065

ISAs for the course will hold their in-person office hours in the CS Consulting Centre. Due to COVID-19 restrictions and the fact there are multiple courses holding office hours there at the same time, the following rules are in-effect:

• You must wear a mask at all times, and you must follow physical distancing requirements. You will be asked to leave if you do not follow these rules.
• The maximum capacity of the waiting area is 4 people total. This includes students waiting for help with other courses. If there are already 4 people waiting inside, then please wait somewhere outside the Consulting Centre.
• Please keep noise to a minimum while waiting for help.
• Please come with a clear, specific, concise question in mind. If you're having problems with your code, you are expected to have already made a strong effort at debugging on your own using tools like Valgrind and GDB. You will be asked to talk through what you've already tried. In busy office hours, course staff may limit time for each help session.