Teaching evaluations for everyone can be found online at Penn Course Review.

To meet a whole bunch of neat women at Penn, join Penn ProWomen.

The computing center is CETS.  For any computing questions or issues, email .  This will return a trouble ticket number to your mailbox, which you must use on any follow-up emails.  CETS is very prompt in responding to issues.

To reserve a CETS lab for a class, browse to https://www.seas.upenn.edu/cets/lab-request.php, or if that doesn't work, email a request to .  CETS (in the Moore 169 office) can also give you the combination to the Moore 207 lab.  It is a good idea, during the first or second class, to bring students into Moore 207, show them how to log on locally to Linux, and teach about text file line-end issues.  I usually make them translate a C program into assembler on both systems (Linux and Windows) so that they can see from the very beginning that the underlying hardware (assembler language) is different for the two operating systems because the underlying processor is of a different type.  I also needed to walk them through the basics of using a text editor (either VI or Emacs).

Various free software is downloadable from http://www.upenn.edu/computing/product/.   Free Microsoft software is at http://msdn07.e-academy.com/elms/Storefront/Home.aspx?campus=upenn_eng (you'll have to email to get a password for this site).

Weiss Tech House on Levine 2nd floor (next to the Walnut St door) is worth knowing about because it is a good place for students to meet each other, or for teaching assistants to hold office hours.

The engineering library, physically located in Towne 217, has a faculty support page.  Library personnel can scan up to about 10% of any book into a .pdf file and let you post the files in Blackboard (or another passworded website).  They can also put books on reserve for you there, which students can borrow for 2 hours at a time for in-library use.  This can be very useful if you cannot find a textbook that covers just everything the way you like it.

In case of snow, find out if Penn is closing by phoning 215-898-MELT.

Transportation after dark: Phone 215-898-WALK for a walking escort 24 hours a day throughout University City.   After 6 pm, the Penn Shuttle at 215-898-RIDE provides riders in University City with "to door" service, and service to Center City on weekdays from 1am-3am (weekends from 6pm - 3am ).  All are free of charge with a valid Penn ID.   After 3am, contact Public Safety at 215-898-WALK or 215-573-3333.

Rita Powell, department manager, will assign you an administrative assistant who will help you, as needed, with copying, ordering books, etc.  You can also take copies directly to the copy center in the Walnut St hallway, GRW ground floor.

Your admin assistant can order books for you; however, it will take them a couple of weeks to arrive.  A faster way to get books is to ask the business office for a book voucher.  Take the voucher to the book store, where you can use it to purchase technical books as needed using the voucher (then, return the voucher receipt to the business office).

You can hire a teaching assistant for each course (although occasionally, the department appoints an Ph D student to act as TA for CIT courses).  You're entitled to one TA per each 15 students in a class.  If you offer lots of projects, you can also hire a grader.  Usually, I get "half" a grader for each course I teach.  So if I'm teaching two courses, I have two TA's and one grader (who grades for both courses but only half time per course).  Dave and Mike Felker can help you locate some good TA's.  My TA from this summer (Arthit Hongchintakul at ) is also available for this fall, and I recommend him highly.  I uses Joey Schorr (an undergraduate) as my grader last year; he's also very good.  TA's and graders can work 10 to 15 hours per week (check with Mike Felker for exactly how many hours.  You'll have to sign their timesheets each week.

The MCIT program also often hires a tutor to help beginning students.

The MCIT program typically has a monthly MCIT pizza bash.   To organize one, just agree on dates with the other MCIT instructors, email your admin to get a room, and arrange for the admin to order pizza for you on that date.  Also, you and the other instructors advertise it to your classes and go eat pizza and schmooze with the students.  Finally, don't forget to send an email to all MCIT students about a week before, and on the day of.

You'll have a mailbox in the CIS office on Levine 3rd floor.

MCIT, CIS and CSE students have student mailbox folders in the file cabinet outside the CIS office on Levine 3rd floor.  This is occasionally useful for distributing exams (although they need to be in sealed envelopes if you put them in these folders, which are public).

Order course textbooks by going to the bookstore website and, in the menus near the upper left, select Faculty Services and then Adoptions.  Alternately, you can ask Mike Felker ( ) to do it for you.

For teaching C, see the getting started with UNIX page (login=handoff, password=handoff); please also see the next entry below on this page for the latest modification of DNS names for the systems.

For C and assembler programming in CIT 593, I have been teaching assembler on Solaris, since its RISC instruction set is somewhat easier than Intel's.  During the first semester, I teach them to read SPARC assembler (integer instructions only), but not really to write it themselves.  I just give them lots of translated C code to read and comment.   See instructions for how to compile C and assemble on the CIT 593 website.

It's a good idea to moss your student's C projects to make sure no one copied anyone else's program.  Information about moss is here.  The command line I used on eniac is: ./moss.pl -l c -d ./prog2/*/*.c ; in this case, all the C programs to be checked were in subdirectories under ./prog2 (and, all this was in my $HOME/html/cgi-bin directory).