First Year Overview
Fall and Spring, Year 1
First-year graduate students must complete several program-specific tasks. The Graduate Program Manager will communicate with students regularly to help ensure they remain on track. The following provides an overview of the first year:
Students must be enrolled in a minimum of 5 credit hours a semester (or 6 credit hours for international students). For the first year, these credit hours are mainly comprised of required (core) classes, including one seminar credit each semester. Students considering dropping a course, should consult the add/drop calendar and the department's Graduate Program Manager before doing so.
Students should be aware that dropping a course after the established drop deadline for the respective semester will result in a reversal of tuition remission for that course, resulting in charge for the associated credit hours.
Throughout the graduate program, students may serve as teaching assistants (TAs) for undergraduate courses and/or research assistants (RAs). All first-year students should expect to work as teaching assistants during both the fall and spring semesters. In later years, transitioning to a research assistantship will depend on available funding and the requirements of the supervising principal investigator (PI).
The department requires first-year graduate students to explore a minimum of three research groups, or “rotations,” during the fall semester. Because rotations are not formally scheduled by the department, students are responsible for seeking out diverse laboratory experiences and learning about potential principal investigators (PIs). Students are encouraged to approach this process with curiosity and an open mind, as they may discover new research interests or areas they had not previously considered.
Formal admission into research labs takes place after Thanksgiving break.