How to ask for help
When working through the examples or exercises, you will get stuck. It’s inevitable.
You absolutely can (and should) reach out when stuck. I’m super responsive on Discord and e-mail. If you ask a question on the #help-me channel in Discord, others can help too. No question is too tricky or embarrassing, I promise. Computers are extraordinarily literal and tiny typos will often mess you up for a long time—I’ve lost countless time because of missing commas and misspelled words (curse you lenght()). Please feel comfortable reaching out.
I’m a big believer in the 30-minute rule:
If you’re stuck on an issue for more than 30 minutes, stop, take a break, and ask for help somewhere.
There are a few easy guidelines to remember when asking for help:
Don’t suffer in silence!
Do not suffer in silence. When you’re stuck, reach out. Do not wallow in your stuck-ness.
I’ve had past students tell me that’s like the one thing they’ll remember from my classes—do not suffer in silence. I mean it, and I’ll keep saying it throughout the semester (because often in your past courses and degrees, you’ve been discouraged from reaching out or from building communities or whatever—that is not the case here).
Use Discord in public
Lots of you have been emailing me or sending me private messages on Discord for assistance, and that’s great and I’m happy to respond like that. However, one way to help build a stronger community for this class is to ask questions in public in the #help-me channel instead. There are a couple reasons for this:
It reduces duplication: Throughout the semester, many of you will have almost identical questions, and I’ll often copy/paste screenshots and identical answers between different private conversations asking for help. Having those questions and answers in
#help-meinstead will let you get answers to common questions faster, and it makes life easier for everyone!It allows you to help: Some of you have R experience already, and even if you don’t, as the summer goes on, you’ll get more comfortable with it and will start being able to answer your classmates’ questions. You might have just fixed a similar issue in a past exercise, or you might be able to spot a typo in their code, or you might otherwise know how to help. Step in and help! Discord is for building a community, not just for getting assistance from me.
You might feel apprehensive about asking in public. Don’t worry: I can assure you that there are no dumb R questions. If you have a question about something, someone else does too!
Help us help you
Ask questions with as complete information as possible. Do not just post a photo from your phone and say something like “help?” or “my code isn’t working” and that’s it—provide more background (it’s hard to read your computer’s mind).
Explain specifically what you’re trying to do and provide code when possible. You can actually format R code on Discord if you include it between triple backticks like this (press shift + enter to add a line break in a Discord message):
```
ggplot(blah) + geom_point()
```If you add “r” after the first set of triple backticks it will add R-based syntax highlighting too (you can use other languages like “python” or “sql” or whatever too, but you don’t need to worry about that for this class):
```r
ggplot(blah) + geom_point()
```You can also take screenshots to supplement your question (use ⌘+shift+4 on macOS to save a screenshot to your Desktop, or ⌘+⌥+shift+4 to save a screenshot directly to the clipboard; use Windows+shift+S on Windows to save a screenshot directly to the clipboard). Do not send a screenshot as your entire question though (it’s very tempting to just post a picture of an error and hope that someone can fix it)—provide context. Screenshots are helpful, but code/text is better—it’s harder for people to get the code out of a screenshot in Discord and into RStudio on their computer to troubleshoot, since you can’t copy/paste from an image.
Try making your question a reproducible example (or reprex). You’ll learn more about reprexes in session 8, but it’s an incredibly important skill to have. See here for some resources about it
High resolution questions
Relatedly, embrace high resolution writing (vs. low resolution writing), when asking questions, so that your messages contain a lot of detail and context.
For instance, here’s an example of low resolution question-asking:
Phew. That process takes forever and is incredibly slow.
Here’s a high resolution version of the same situation:
That second example is much longer than just saying “my code isn’t working”, but it gets an answer significantly faster because it contains complete details to help someone else help.
Embrace high resolution writing.
Unanswered questions
Stuff like this happens all the time on websites where people ask for help (and in Discord):
If you ask a question and then figure out the answer yourself, let us know how you did it! It’s likely that other people have similar questions and issues, and seeing solved-but-unexplained questions is sad:
Discord question etiquette
The #help-me channel on Discord is a little different from the other channels. It’s more like a forum, where questions have titles and all responses appear in question-specific threads. Try to follow a few general guidelines there:
- Use informative titles: Don’t create a post called “Help!” or “Homework question” or “Stuck!” or things like that. Similar to the idea of high-resolution question asking, try to make your title more informative, like “Can’t change color in plot in exercise 3” or something like that.
- Keep conversations on topic: You absolutely should look at other peoples’ questions to see how they’re answered—and you can answer and participate in them too! This is another reason for informative titles—it’ll be hard for other people to browse through past questions if they’re all called “Help!”. If you have a different question or topic, make a new post—don’t ask it in an unrelated question.
- Close the question if it’s been answered: Similar to the idea of unanswered questions, if your question has been answered, it’s generally good practice to say so in the post. Like, add a comment like “Thanks! That fixed it!” or something—or even add a ✅ emoji reaction. That’ll signal to me that I can close the post. The post will still be there in
#help-me, but it won’t be up at the top with active questions.
Calendly + Webex appointments
You can meet with me for student hours by signing up for an appointment at my Calendly page. The link is also accessible at the top of the syllabus page and on the main homepage of the class site.
Calendly connects to my personal and work calendars and should only show times when I’m available. If you sign up for an online appointment, you’ll receive an e-mail with a special Webex link that you can use for the meeting.
Make sure the e-mail you use is correct—if you don’t get a confirmation e-mail with the meeting details, it’s likely that there was a typo in your e-mail address.
If you need to change or cancel the appointment, you can do that using a link in the confirmation e-mail.
On rare occasions, I will cancel an appointment from my end. This only happens if I forget to put a work or personal appointment on my calendar, so Calendly thinks I’m free when I’m really not.
If I cancel an appointment with you, don’t worry. I don’t hate you or anything. I’m not trying to avoid you. I most likely had some accidental or unforeseen scheduling conflict. In my cancellation note, I’ll say something like “Oh no! I’m so sorry! Can you sign up for a different time please?!”. Do that :)