Tips for New Students

This page is for advice for new students. If you have any advice please add it. This is especially helpful if you are or recently were a new student. Anything you wish you had known would probably be helpful to others.

Setting Up Your Workstation

See Tips for Setting Up Your Workstation.

Courses

Choosing Which Courses to Take

There are three sources of information on available courses:

• The CS Current course offerings page
• classes.uwaterloo.ca
• Quest (where you go to actually register for classes)

Information on future terms marked as "tentative" or "preliminary" is not reliable; it is often just copied from previous terms as a placeholder. The "Current course offerings" page lists the most useful information, including recommended background and area.

UpcomingCourses lists a curated subset of courses from the "Current course offerings" page that are related to cryptography, security, or privacy, along with any additional information that is available about these courses.

You should discuss which courses to take with your supervisor. Be aware of your program requirements (MMath, PhD). If you are currently an MMath student but are considering a PhD at the University of Waterloo, note that the courses you take now can count towards your PhD breadth requirement. (You may want to take courses in certain areas now to help you later.)

Generally speaking...

• 600-level courses are cross-listed as 400-level undergraduate courses and require some additional work for graduate students, such as completing a research survey.
• 700-level courses are graduate-level lecture courses.
• 800-level courses are seminar courses. The focus in these courses is on actively engaging with an area of research and doing some research of your own, rather than on learning a specific set of information. You can expect to read lots of research papers in a particular area, write reviews on some or all of the papers, present one or two of the papers, and complete a short research project. The research project is not expected to be publishable by the end of the term, but some course projects go on to become full papers and/or theses. (You are allowed and even encouraged to turn a course project into your thesis project.)

You are encouraged to take 800-level courses. These courses teach you important skills as a researcher and may even give you a head start on your thesis.

Locating Course Content

Different instructors will put course content in different places, but usually they use some combination of public course pages (e.g., the instructor's website), LEARN, and/or Piazza.

Instructors often use LEARN to share course content and post information about grades. You may complete online quizzes or submit assignments on LEARN. LEARN also supports forums, but it is more common in CS courses to use Piazza for this purpose. On a course page on LEARN, you can go to Connect > Classlist to see the list of students in the course. This can be useful for connecting with your classmates, for example to find project partners.

Piazza is often used in CS courses for students to ask questions. Some professors also post course content on Piazza, but this is less common.