11 Staff and Contact

Note: Unless indicate otherwise, all email addresses below have an @cs.brown.edu suffix.

11.1 Who We Are

See the staff all together, thanks to Neil Ramaswamy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYI1vOGqClE

11.2 Hours

For Shriram’s hours, see his calendar page.

Before you see a TA, please fill out this form. It’s designed to help you structure your thoughts so you can go in more focused and get better help. Fill it out each time you go to meet a TA, even if that’s multiple times in the same session.

11.3 Labs

11.4 How to Contact Us

Please subscribe to our course discussion site. Use the code 8041 to join.

Please be careful with your posts. They should not give away solutions. In general, it’s a bad idea to include code or math in a post unless you can be quite sure it’s not revealing a solution (wait for course staff to ask you to do so).

Your posts there are anonymous to other students but not to the course staff.

Any question you post there is private by default, i.e., it will only be seen by course staff (including the professor). Therefore, you can freely ask questions without worrying about violations of course collaboration policy.

Note: This is a new Campuswire site, not the one used for summer placement discussion.

Unless your issue is confidential in some way, please use Campuswire, not email, as your first point of contact.

Please do not use the Direct Messaging feature of Campuswire. This is part of respecting the time of your course staff; please read below.

If you have questions about a grade on an assignment, first come to the hours of the TA who graded you. If you are still not satisfied, you can escalate your complaint.

11.5 What to Not Do

Excluding confidential issues, please do not write to individual course staff unless they have asked you to do so; if you write a course staff member directly, they will ignore your message. All course staff have an existence outside the context of this course, and their time when they aren’t working as a TA is their own. Instead, always follow the instructions above. This will not only get you the next available person on duty, it will also get you quicker responses.

When replying to email, always group-reply (a.k.a., “reply all”) unless you have a good reason not to. Otherwise people lose context, worry that you haven’t responded, etc., etc.

11.6 Staff Emails

11.7 Want Advice?

If you have a question unrelated to the course and just want one of the staff’s advice, do ask us. We’re friendly and eager to answer questions though, of course, we cannot commit to responding to emails not related to the course in a timely manner.

11.8 Another View…

By the end of this semester, you’ll know exactly what’s going on here.