Advice for Purdue ECE Graduate Students for Plan of Study for MS or PhD

Saurabh Bagchi

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. If you have a prior MS, see if you can transfer some of the credits from there. These would count as “Related Area” courses.
  4. 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.
  5. For the core courses, you would typically take ECE 608 and ECE 600.
  6. 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.
  7. If you are working in a security-related project, consider taking CS 526.
  8. 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).
  9. 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). 
  10. 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

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