So, you might notice that our linter enforces PEP8's convention of 79-char lines. One way to write this to fit is like this:

```python
response = requests.get('%s/courses/%s.json?key=%s' % (
        API_UWATERLOO_V2_URL, department.upper(),
        secrets.OPEN_DATA_API_KEY))
open_data_json = response.json()
```

Yep, Python requests can convert from JSON for you: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/api/#requests.Response.json

(Also, using `str.format()` is perfectly fine, but most of our existing code just uses the older `%s`-style formatting.)