Category: <span>Current Interest</span>

In Fall, 2025, I will be teaching the undergraduate introductory networking class.

As in my other recent administrations, the class will be completely flipped. Complete slides and video (or voiceover) lectures are made available for each unit when that unit is started. New units usually start every week; some units occupy two weeks. The lecture meeting times are entirely problem sessions, with quizzes and Q&A.

Homework assignments are significantly sized, and are fundamentally instructional in nature. Most homework problems require going one, two, or several steps beyond the examples shown in slides, both to allow students to test and gain confidence in their comprehension, and also to gain insight that can only be found by actively working out problems (and not by seeing them worked out in class, on slides or videos, or in a book or website). There are also several of them – most recent administrations comprised around ten homework assignments.

Together, the two points above mean that to earn good grades in this course, students should expect to spend a significant number of hours outside the lecture – as expected in a high-level undergraduate elective.

An updated syllabus will be posted here soon; and will be available to registered students through the Moodle locker for the course.

Many students email me, and other faculty members, to request funding in the form of Research or Teaching Assistantships, or as hourly graders. I quite understand such requests, but sadly, my response is always that I have none to offer. This is not a reflection on your resume, but due to factors explained below (if you are interested). The bottomline is that I can do no more than mail you back the same information as below. Given how constrained my time and availability is, I often have to choose not to respond to you at all; I hope you understand the situation, and take this post as my blanket response.

TA positions are assigned by the department (specifically the Graduate Office of the department), not by individual instructors. The department uses our available TA slots mainly to fund PhD students; it is our primary means of supporting PhD students early in their career, when they typically do not have any research funding. Once the Graduate Office has decided the list of TAs, individual instructors such as myself can indeed express preference for some available TA for some course through the GradWatch system – but we cannot ask for somebody that has not been awarded TA funding to be awarded TA funding.

RA funding does become available from time to time, but like many other faculty I would only consider awarding such funding to research students after working with them initially for some time (while they are supported by TA positions), if such work is going well. And I tend to work exclusively with PhD students, not Master’s students (see further comments in the “Prospective Students” section).

Sometimes hourly grader slots do open up, and then they are indeed up to individual instructors to award. When I have any such available, I post them here, and invite interested students to submit resumes. (If you see no such post at some given time, that means I do not have any grader hours assigned to my courses for the current or upcoming semesters.)

Rarely I have development jobs open in support for my research projects that carry an hourly pay appointment. Again, I would post them here and other university forums; if you do not see any, that is because I have none open at the moment.

All the best to you in your academic endeavors; unfortunately I cannot offer you any funding.

I continue to serve as MSCN advisor for students in registered in the Computer Science department. if you are a CSC student enrolled in the MSCN program, you should bring advising issues to me. (ECE students in the program should go to the ECE coordinator, as always.)