2.009 Lab Sign Up

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Lab Section Signup

Please ignore the registrar's lab section assignments... they will not be used*.

You must complete the on-line signup form, indicating your lab time preferences, to be assigned to a lab section and team.

Registration for lab sections opens at 3:00 PM on Wednesday, September 5 following the first lecture and closes at 5 PM on Saturday, September 8. If you miss this deadline, you will be assigned to the smallest section to balance team sizes.

The lab section assignments will be posted on the course website by 8:00 PM on Sunday, September 9. The first team activity is during class on Monday, the project idea fair is Monday evening, and it is very important to be with your team during the first lab, so having all of the teams stabilized on Monday is important.

Signup for labs.
Check the lab assignment results!

* There are 4 main reasons that we do not use the lab section assignments from the registrar:

i.	We want to make sure that all teams are the same size. While 2.009 is not a competition, students on significantly smaller teams have felt like they had an unfair burden.
ii.	By allowing class members to indicate their top lab preferences before assigning lab sections, we can almost always allocate people to their first or second choice, creating a schedule that works best for everyone in the class while meeting the equal team size constraint.
iii.	We want to accommodate your lab time preferences but, at the same time, have a relatively random assignment process. In the past, we have found that teams with large blocks of friends tended to make decisions based on allegiance rather than technical merit.
iv.	Some of the lab instructors and mentors are outside experts. In order to accommodate their schedules we often need to shift the number of sections offered in a particular time slot after the schedule is published by the registrar.