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Quarter 1 Week 4 TA Check-In

In Week 4 – that is, between Monday, October 21st and Friday, October 25th – you are required to meet with your assigned TA in-person for 20 minutes. You can see your assigned TA on the Staff pages.

The purpose of the check-in is to ensure that all students in the capstone have made sufficient progress in learning about their domain and to identify any potential barriers to making progress (e.g. technical troubles, lack of clarity or direction from mentor, interpersonal conflicts). Your TA will ask you the following questions:

  • Do you have a clear idea of the kinds of problems you’re going to work on?
    • For example, if your domain is about natural language processing, can you give description of your problem space that’s more detailed than “we’re learning about NLP?” Can you mention specific techniques?
  • Do you feel confused or off-track? Have you been given sufficient direction from your mentor?
  • Do you have an idea of what your Quarter 1 Project will be about?
  • Have you started to write code? Where is it stored, and how is it organized?
  • Do you have the data you need for your Quarter 1 Project, or are you in the process of acquiring it? Do you foresee any roadblocks in your Quarter 1 Project work?
  • Has your mentor already placed you into groups? How do they plan on doing so? Are you doing your Quarter 1 Project work individually or in groups?
  • Any concerns with your mentor or with group dynamics (e.g. someone not pulling their weight)?
  • Do you have any questions about what is expected of you?

Check-ins will be done in groups of 4 and will last 20 minutes. Each 20 minute slot (or “block”) should consist of students from the same domain. If you’re working in a group of 4 already, then your entire group should sign up for the same “block”. Otherwise, you should sign up for a block with other people in your domain. For instance, if there are 8 of you and you’re all working individually, then 4 of you should sign up for one block and 4 should sign up for another; if there are 6 of you, you can split yourselves into 4 and 2 or 3 and 3. Under no circumstance should there be students from different domains in the same block! If you can’t make any of your TA’s slots, send an email to both them and me explaining your circumstances.

To sign up for a check-in, go to to this sheet. Make sure to sign up for a check-in with the correct TA! All check-ins are held in-person in the HDSI building; locations can be found in the sheet.