How to ask good questions.

Written by 250 TA Brandon Jenkins.

This course focuses on building core data science skills. You will learn to program, but you will also learn how to communicate and collaborate with your peers and mentors. Asking good questions is an essential skill for a data scientist.

Asking a tutor or TA

We want to help you with your work; we want to answer your questions; but most importantly, we want to help you succeed in this class. That will require you to put in the necessary time in understanding the readings, coding, and debugging. When you ask us a question we expect that you have read the documentation, searched the textbook, and done your own research. Then we can be most helpful and can provide insights on top of your understanding.

Examples of bad questions

• How does drop() work? We will ask you to read the documentation for drop().
• How do you make a table in a markdown file? We will refer you to the textbook.
• I don’t want these columns in my data, how can I drop them? We will ask you if you have found any things on the internet.

Examples of good questions

• I am still confused about the syntax of drop(). After reading the documentation, this is my understanding of the function… . What am I missing?
• I tried making a table in markdown (*shows code*), it is still not giving me what I want, how can I fix this?
• I am trying to drop these columns in my dataframe, I think drop() is what I am looking for. Am I in the right direction? If not, what keywords should I be googling?