Advice for Purdue ECE Graduate
Students for Plan of Study for MS or PhD
Saurabh Bagchi
- Put the minimum number of
courses in the Plan of Study (POS) that you have to take as per the
guidelines. You can always take more courses than what you have put in the
POS. But you are committed to taking the courses that you have put in the
POS.
- In the early semesters (say
the first three semesters), take 2 courses each. After that take
preferably 1 course each semester. You may have to break this guideline to
get the courses that you want, prepare for QE, etc. Balance
project/implementation-heavy courses with analytical courses, such as, ECE
547 with CS 503.
- If you have a prior MS, see
if you can transfer some of the credits from there. These would count as
“Related Area” courses.
- Courses offered by Computer
Science (CS) count toward the “Related Area” courses. So consider taking
relevant ones from there. As a result, most students in our research group
take 2 Math and 3 Related Area courses.
- For the core courses, you
would typically take ECE 608 and ECE 600.
- You should consider taking
ECE 695 (Fault-tolerant Computer System Design, taught by me) and one of ECE 673 (Distributed
Systems, taught by Charlie) or ECE 695 (Operating Systems Design and Implementation, taught by Felix).
These courses meet the requirement of ECE courses numbered above 611. ECE 695 gets a permanent number from Fall 2017 of ECE 60872.
- If you are working in a
security-related project, consider taking CS 526.
- If your probability and
statistics background is not solid, say if the knowledge has become
somewhat rusty, consider one or two of the following courses for your Math
requirement: MA 519 (Introduction To Probability), MA 532 (Elements Of
Stochastic Processes), or MA 538 (Probability Theory I).
- An easy, though irrelevant
for most (but not all) DCSL students, Math course to take to meet the
requirement is MA 511 (Linear Algebra with Applications).
- If you feel you are lacking
in some programming, object-oriented, or OS background at the
undergraduate level, consider taking one or more of these in your first
year: ECE 368 (Data Structures) - for learning C and basic algorithms, ECE
435 (Object-Oriented Design Using C++ And Java) and ECE 469 (Operating
Systems Engineering). These can qualify for graduate credit if taken in your first year.
Last updated: November 22, 2016
Back to Home Page