Helping

[DossarLX ODI]

Providing help to someone is a topic that’s been on my mind for the past few months during my spring semester and it’s making me wonder what some others think about the concept of providing help to someone that asks for it. I will illustrate two examples from my experience to spark some thoughts:

1.) In Bioinformatics, my professor was so vague and even had some incorrect information on his presentations that I always had broken code unless a very generous friend helped me. This friend not only gave me working code samples to learn from, but also fixed most of the bugs in my programs until the midterm (where I started doing most of the physical coding myself). However, you can see there was a heavy reliance on this person here, but at the same time no working solutions were posted after the due dates, so any person that wasn’t able to get a program working is left in the dark with broken code.

2.) Similar to the above except for an Assembly Language Programming class, one person in particular (let’s call him Joe here) requested help from me throughout the course. However, he did not check over the programs, I basically modified everything for him. He didn’t even have a working assembler. Worse, he didn’t even start the last IA32 assembly assignment until the very last day which I completed for him in 2 hours despite the assignment time being 3 weeks to finish. At the final, Joe had the audacity to ask me right in front of the class what his bomb number was and I risked getting a zero on the final. Obviously this person was a complete inconsiderate asshole who viewed the course as busy work.

In the first example, I see what it is like to ask someone else for help often but I did it with the intention that I wanted to learn and I didn’t want to be left in the dark just because some person thinks it’s ok to waste students’ money by saying a course is a “high level course” – not providing help. In the second example I can understand what it is like to have broken code that doesn’t work, but saying my name in front of everyone at the final exam aggravated me immensely.

Remember the above two examples are just examples of situations involving helping another person. There are many more that I would like the readers here to think about and share/give input on. What lines do you set for helping another person with something?