For general research and professional inquiries, email away. I have advice for a few specific categories (e.g. for prospective students or tutors) below.

Email
jpolitz@ucsd.edu
joe.politz@gmail.com

Synchronously
Jan-June 2025 I am on sabbatical and have no scheduled office hours.

If we've scheduled a Zoom meeting and you aren't sure where to find me, a good bet is to try https://jpolitz.github.io/contact/zoom.txt

Postal mail
Joseph Gibbs Politz
EBU3B Computer Science and Engineering, Office 3206
7835 Trade St., Suite 100
San Diego, CA 92121

Phone
Please email first. If you are a student and have to provide a phone number on a form related to a recommendation letter, use (858) 534-8872.

Social media
I semi-actively use Twitter/X as @joepolitz and Bluesky as @joepolitz.bsky.social.
Other social media accounts in my name are either placeholders that I don't actively monitor, or aren't controlled by me.

Referring to me
I use “Joe Gibbs Politz” as my publishing/professional name. Politz is my last name/family name, pronounced like POLE-eats.
My preference is that you call me “Joe”, including if you're a student.
If you prefer to use a title, any combination of “Dr.”, “Professor”, “Joe,” and “Politz” is fine.
I use masculine pronouns (he/him/his).

Current UCSD Students

Email away and I'll do my best to respond. If you find yourself spending a lot of time writing or figuring out the tone for you message, here's some useful advice on communicating (with me) via email: How to email

Questions in a Course with Me

Use the course web site and course message board (e.g. Piazza, Campuswire), unless you have an academic accommodation or other specific concern that cannot be handled by a TA. In that case, please do email me!

If you email me a routine question about course content, I will ask you to put it on the message board. A TA or tutor will likely be able to answer more quickly than I can, and even if they can't, I'll process the message board about as quickly as email.

Research

If you're interested in working on Pyret, using it and reporting issues is a great way to contribute. If you want to really get my attention, tackle one of the good first issues for code.pyret.org or the language.

If you have a specific idea spurred by coursework or your own research directions, feel free to email or come by office hours to chat.

For Prospective Tutors

I get a lot of tutor applications, and don't always have a chance to interview everyone who applies. Here's what you should do to help me best evaluate your application:

• Put my course as your first or second preference.
• Describe a misconception you had about programming in your own learning. Give an example of a program that would help someone with a similar misconception understand why their understanding is incorrect.
• Tell me two concrete things you want to improve about the course experience, from content to presentation to culture to lab hours, in your essay.
• Type the following sentence in your essay, or explain why it's not true: “I expect to be available for course duties from the first day of the quarter (which is earlier than the first day of instruction) until grades are due.”
• If there's something on your resume that you want me to pay particular attention to, mention it in your essay.
• My classes are often large. One thing tutors help with is scaling logistics. If you have experience that taught you to manage logistics, scheduling, or automation, tell me about it in your essay.
• Don't email me the content above – put it in the application. We are lucky to have a centralized application system that has prompts for the information I need. Also, keep the essay relatively short. Don't take more than a few sentences for any of the points above.

Note that only the department makes tutor offers; I merely express my preferences and I may be competing with other professors for your time! Also note that you shouldn't be afraid to apply to tutor if you got a B in the course, nor should you assume that a high letter grade in the course you're applying for convinces me that you'll be a successful tutor.

For Prospective TAs

You can generally follow the advice for tutors, with some augmentation:

• The automation and logistics point is especially important for TAs.
• Focus on your teaching presentation video. One of the main tasks I often assign TAs is leading discussion sections, and I care about your ability to semi-independently prepare and present material.

I use the official application system exclusively to make TA decisions; I'll contact you if I need more information based on your application. Again, note that the department has the final say in all TA hiring decisions, we merely list one another as potentially mutual preferences.

For a Recommendation Letter

If your only contact with me is through taking an undergraduate course, and we've never had a conversation longer than a few minutes, I will likely say “no” to writing you a letter for PhD programs. After writing a lot of these, I've decided that they're not providing much value, because I can't say anything that isn't said reasonably well by your transcript. If you just need a short acknowledgement that you're in my class, I'm happy to do it, but beyond that I'll usually decline – certainly PhD program letters require that I know more about you for them to be useful.

If we've worked together outside of classes at all and I can give relevant comments on your experience, ask away! When you request a letter, include:

• What kinds of positions you're applying to. If you need the letters for graduate school, make it abundantly clear what department you are applying to and if it is for a masters or PhD program.
• What the first deadline is (once I've written the letter for one place, it's usually trivial to send it to others, so the first deadline is what matters). If this deadline is less than a month away, sometimes I struggle to to write the letter in time.
• List, as a sentence or two each, 3-5 things that you did in your role that you're proud of. For example, if you worked on a research project with me, what were the contributions you felt you really owned and drove to success? If you were my tutor, did you build a new assignment, or were you a logistics wizard, or did you really nail Piazza management during a hectic period? If you took multiple courses with me and did all the optional extensions to assignments for your own learning, what did you get out of it?
• If the program requires you to write a statement of purpose, research statement, etc, send a draft of that along with your request for a letter. Feel free to come to my advising office hours if you want help reviewing your letter.
• The name and pronouns you'd like me to use to refer to you in the letter.

If the letter is for a PhD program, read this for some perspective on the letter-writing process from the faculty perspective: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Grad-School-Recos/. Practice concise writing, and don't write an entire draft of a letter. Your writeup of the above items shouldn't take up more space than the instructions themselves do.

Please do not get me gifts related to letter writing. Seriously! That's not a reverse-psychology way to ask you to get me a gift! Don't do it, please. The best and only gift I want is you going on to be successful in what you want to do.

Prospective PhD Students

I'm affiliated with the ProgSys group at UCSD, but as a teaching-focused faculty I'm not currently looking to be the primary advisor of PhD students. You should definitely apply to and come to UCSD, and we might even do research together! I'm just not looking for the dedicated mentor/apprentice relationship right now.