Home > Academics > Degrees & Programs > Doctoral Program Guide
 
A Guide to the Computer Science and Engineering Doctoral Program at Washington University in St. Louis

Your decision to pursue a doctoral degree is the start of an extraordinary intellectual adventure which, I hope, will lead you on the path of significant discoveries. Now is the time to dream up new ideas and to explore what others before you have thought out in their research pursuits. Our faculty will be here to guide you, to light the fires of your imagination, and to shape passion into method. Individualized mentoring and frontier research are the defining features of our doctoral program. On behalf of the faculty, I extend you an enthusiastic welcome, and I wish you success.

Gruia-Catalin Roman

Welcome! We look forward to watching you move through our doctoral program. Working on your doctorate is a very demanding yet rewarding experience. It's a time when you can focus on a specific research area that interests you and bring new and exciting ideas to that area. We look forward to helping to facilitate your progress through our program. While most of your guidance will come from your research advisor, please come talk to us at any time if you have concerns or questions.

Enjoy your stay with us!

Jeremy Buhler (director)
Aaron Stump
Weixiong Zhang

1. Requirements at a glance
2. Breadth and Coursework Requirements
   • Breadth Requirements
   • Credit Requirements
   • Administrative Aspects
3. Milestones
   • Milestone 1: oral qualifying examination
   • Milestone 2: admission to doctoral candidacy
   • Milestones 3 and 4: thesis proposal and dissertation
4. Other Student Responsibilities
   • Choosing a Research Advisor
   • Doctoral Student Research Seminar
   • Colloquium Series
   • Annual Review of Progress
   • Academic Integrity
   • Residency Requirement and Outside Employment Policy
5. The Combined B.S./D.Sc. Program

The graduation requirements for the D.Sc. program are given in the Graduate Catalogue of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This guide explains in detail how the CSE Department interprets, and in some cases extends, the school-mandated requirements.

• Credits
  • The D.Sc. degree requires a minimum of 72 credit units.
  • Take a total of 36 to 48 course credits.
    • Satisfy the doctoral breadth requirements.
    • Take at least 3 units of seminars (CSE 7xxx).
    • Take at least 33 non-seminar course units.
  • Take 24 to 36 units of CSE 699 (doctoral research).
• Key program milestones
  • Passage of oral qualifying examination
  • Portfolio review and admission to candidacy by the CSE faculty
  • Thesis proposal and oral examination
  • Dissertation and oral defense
• Continuing requirements
  • Choose a research advisor.
  • Sign up for and attend the Doctoral Student Research Seminar.
  • Attend the colloquium series.
  • Complete annual reviews of progress.

The initial part of your doctoral study includes a coursework requirement to ensure that you have sufficient breadth of knowledge to be an active member of a research enterprise in your field. During this time, you also have the opportunity to fill in any gaps in your undergraduate education and to take courses that will help advance your research aims.

Breadth course requirements are divided into several areas. You must take the specified number of courses from each area, choosing from among the list shown. Where two courses are listed as "X or Y", only one of these two courses may be counted toward the breadth requirement.

Some of the courses listed below are 400-level (i.e. part of our undergraduate curriculum). You may count at most three 400-level courses toward your breadth requirements.

Note that the Computer Science and Computer Engineering doctoral programs have different breadth requirements. Aside from this difference, the two programs share the same requirements and procedures.

Notes: if you need to map courses under the old CS and CoE numbering systems to the current numbers given above, please use the mapping document available from our course description page. You may also be interested in the rationale behind the list of CS breadth courses.

All breadth requirements must be satisfied before you present your thesis proposal. Additionally, at least four of the six requirements must be satisfied, either by taking courses or by transfers, before you may be considered for the portfolio review.

Each course counted toward the breadth requirements must be passed with a grade of B or above. You should maintain an overall GPA of 3.6 for your breadth courses, which implies no more than two B's out of the six required courses. (Note that the engineering school does not factor +'s and -'s into the GPA; i.e., a B and a B+ count the same, as do an A and an A-.) While you may be allowed to continue in the program with a lower breadth GPA, the faculty may require you to prove yourself through additional coursework.

Note that grades below B are considered "unsatisfactory" by the Engineering School. If you receive such a grade, it is probably wise to at least talk to your course instructor before trying to pass your portfolio review.

If you have taken a CSE course at another university and would like to have that course counted toward your breadth requirements, you may do so with the approval of your advisor (which must be documented via a memo to the department secretary in charge of student records). Courses used to satisfy breadth should be 400- or 500-level and should be equivalent to a Wash U. course that you would otherwise use to satisfy your breadth requirements. Note that your advisor may ask you to get approval from the person who teaches the equivalent course.

Important note: using a course from another institution to satisfy a breadth requirement does not cause the credit to transfer. See the next section for the (considerably stricter) rules on transfer credit.

You need a total of 72 credits to satisfy the doctoral program requirements. Of these, at least 36 and at most 48 must be course credits, including any transfer credits. Courses taken for the doctoral breadth requirements fulfill 18 of these credits, leaving a requirement of at least five additional 3-credit courses plus the seminar requirement detailed below.

At least 33 of your course credits must be from regular (non-seminar) courses, while at least three course credits must be from research seminars. These seminars, which are typically designated CSE 7xxx, entail both discussion and oral presentation by students of cutting-edge research in a particular area of CSE. Please note that, as a matter of departmental policy, you may only take a given research seminar for one credit per semester. Some cross-departmental seminars may offer 2- or 3-credit options, but CSE students are not eligible for these options. Note also that seminars count toward your course credits, not your research credits.

Courses taken at Washington University outside the CSE department may be counted toward your total course credit requirement at the discretion of your advisor. Generally, such courses must be relevant to your research area and at 500-level or above.

If you complete a CS or CoE master's degree at Washington University, credits taken to satisfy the MS requirements may be counted toward your doctoral credit requirement. Note that all MS credits, including those for CSE 599 "Masters Research," are counted as course credits. They cannot be counted as research credits.

You may obtain transfer credit for courses taken from another institution that meet all of the following requirements:

1. The course must be considered "graduate" where it was taught. Essentially, it must be 500-level or above. Exceptions to this rule are possible but rare.
2. The course must not have been used to satisfy an undergraduate degree requirement. Because this determination is often difficult to make, our usual rule is that you must have had graduate standing when you took the course. Courses taken as part of a master's or doctoral program, a graduate certification program, or as a SNCD (student not candidate for degree) are all eligible.
3. The department must approve the transfer after reviewing the course's content.

Even with transfer credit from another institution, you must take at least 9 graded credits of course work as a graduate student at Washington University to obtain a CS or CoE doctoral degree.

You will fulfill your 24-36 non-course credit requirements by taking research credits, in the form of CSE 699 (Doctoral Research). Research credits must be arranged with your research advisor. Prior to being admitted to candidacy, you can take up to 3 research credits per semester. After admission to candidacy, you can take up to 9 research credits per semester.

Once you have completed 72 units, you should register for only one unit of CSE 888 (Doctoral Candidacy) each semester until you complete your doctoral study. CSE 888 intended to be a "holding status" for students close to their dissertation defense. You should therefore space out your research credits over time so as not to reach this status prematurely.

Students funded on department fellowships or research assistantships are typically limited in how many credits they can take per semester at the department's expense. Please check your appointment letter for details.

Finally, taking even one unit of CSE 699 (Doctoral Research) is sufficient to satisfy a foreign student's visa requirements. You need not take a full 9-credit load to qualify in a given semester if you take 699.

Your graduate career is marked by a series of milestones achieved on the way to your doctorate. At each milestone, you will demonstrate certain skills and abilities critical to success in CSE research. The CSE faculty (and in some cases, the faculty of the whole Engineering School) have defined these milestones both to give you intermediate targets at which to aim and to give us ways to assess your progress toward the doctorate.

The following table lists the milestones of the doctoral program and indicates roughly how long it should take you to reach each one. Times are given in years relative to when you enter the program. Note that the indicated times are only approximate, and some variation is natural. For example, a student who enters the program with a CS or CoE master's degree from another university is likely to proceed faster, while a student without an undergraduate CS or CoE degree is likely to proceed more slowly.

Some students, for a variety of reasons, are not able to complete the entire process of attaining a doctoral degree. You should do your best to understand, at the earliest possible stage in your doctoral program, which steps may be troublesome for you and to work to meet these challenges. At any step in the process, the faculty may raise concerns about your ability to continue and may even ask you to leave the program. This does not mean that you are a failure, only that the faculty strongly believes that continuing with D.Sc. research is not in your best interest. We have seen, over and over again, that making this determination earlier rather than later is in the best interest of both students and faculty.

If a student has a healthy relationship with her research advisor, concerns from the faculty about the student's ability to continue in the program should never come as a surprise. Moreover, the Doctoral Program Committee is responsible for tracking the progress of doctoral students and alerting both student and advisor to any substantive concerns while there is still time to take corrective action.

The oral qualifying examination tests your ability to read deeply the literature in your research area, to synthesize and to critically evaluate existing research results, to present these results in a scholarly and professional oral presentation, and to answer orally questions from the faculty about the literature you've read. All of these skills are important for being able to pursue research at the doctoral level.

To the extent that the research area for your oral exam is related to your doctoral research area, the time you spend preparing for the exam should help you make progress toward your degree. The exam will also be one of (we hope) many opportunities for you to build confidence in your research and oral presentation skills.

Important Note: there are two activities that may serve as substitutes for the oral qualifying exam. Either activity must be carried out while you are a student in the Washington University CSE Department.

1. If you have conducted a master's thesis in our department, the research performed for this thesis and its oral defense are an acceptable substitute.
2. If you have delivered at least three oral research presentations at conferences, this activity may serve as an acceptable substitute at your advisor's and the department's discretion.

When you are ready to proceed with the oral qualifying examination, you should meet with the your advisor to identify a topic. You and your advisor will then assemble an oral examination committee and, in collaboration with this committee, will select three research papers upon which the oral examination will be based.

Notes on oral exam committee composition: Your committee must include at least three faculty members (your advisor may not serve on this committee and will not be present at the exam). We recommend that the chair of the committee be someone in your research area who can act as advocate for you at the exam, and that at least one committee member be from outside your research area.

You are expected to read each assigned paper in depth to understand both the significance of its results and the details of how these results were achieved. You will likely need to do significant background reading to understand the details of the work and to place it in its historical context. Most importantly, you should form well-informed opinions about how the work in the different papers is related, the quality of the work, and the relative merits and limitations of the approaches. In short, you should demonstrate that, after a thorough review of existing literature, you now know how to proceed with research in the chosen area. Your advisor will not work closely with you on exam preparation; for more details, see this advisor's guide to the oral qual.

When you are ready to proceed (in at most about three months), you should prepare a polished, professional, conference-style oral presentation of around 35 minutes that presents an overall view of and direction for work in the area represented by the papers. You should make clear the important ideas of the papers, explain and evaluate their significance and methods, relate them to each other, and synthesize your overall view from them and from other closely related work. The presentation should be an impressive display of your ability to read research papers in depth, to digest the material, and to present it at a scholarly level. We strongly recommend practicing your presentation for other students prior to the exam. A clear, polished, practiced presentation heads off much confusion and makes it easier and much more pleasant for you and the committee to engage in a dialog about the area of your presentation. (This advice goes double or triple for subsequent milestones!)

During and after your presentation, the committee will ask you questions about the substance of the papers and their implications for your research area and your own planned work. (We recommend scheduling at least 1.5 hours total for your exam to allow sufficient time for questions.) At the end, the committee confers in private to determine whether you have passed the exam.

There are three possible outcomes to an oral exam:

• Pass, allowing the student to continue to the next milestone.
• Fail, asking the student to retake the exam.
• Fail without the option to retake, effectively asking the student to leave the program.

In the event that you fail the oral examination and are asked to retake it, you should immediately confer with your examining committee to determine the areas in which your performance fell short of the committee's expectations. You should then arrange to retake the exam, using the same topic and papers, within one month. Your committee for an exam retake should include at least one member who was present at the previous exam, and at least one new member who was not present.

The new policies associated with the oral qualifier were adopted by the faculty during the 2004-2005 academic year. Students who started in the CSE Doctoral Program prior to fall 2005 may choose to pass the oral exam under the old procedure that was in place at the time they enrolled. For these students,

• The oral may be deferred until after the portfolio review.
• The advisor may be present at the exam.

The second milestone, admission to doctoral candidacy, implements the written qualifying examination mandated by our School of Engineering. Its intent is to assess whether you have (or will soon achieve) both sufficient breadth in CSE and sufficient ability to carry out independent research in your field.

Before you can be considered for candidacy, you must:

• pass the oral qualifying examination;
• satisfy at least four of the six breadth requirements, whether by taking courses or by transfers;
• take at least nine graded credits of course work while a graduate student at Washington University.

Your major task for admission to candidacy is to prepare a written portfolio demonstrating that you can contribute significantly to original research. A student's portfolio may contain any desired written materials, including selected homeworks, exams, or publications. However, the centerpiece of the portfolio must be a written product of research performed as part of a relationship with your research advisor at Wash U. You must make a substantial contribution both to the research itself and to the composition of this written material.

The centerpiece of your portfolio may be a research paper (submitted or accepted) or a technical report. You need not be the primary author of this work, but your contribution must be substantial enough that the work can be used as a demonstration of your ability to carry out research and to write clearly about your results.

Important Note: if you have done a master's thesis in the Washington University CSE Department, this thesis may serve as your portfolio's centerpiece.

When you and your advisor determine that you should be reviewed for admission to candidacy, you will assemble your portfolio and submit it to the Director of the Doctoral Program. The review should happen by the start of the student's fifth semester, though it can (and hopefully will) occur earlier.

Your portfolio submission should include a cover letter listing the portfolio's contents, certifying that you have passed your oral qualifying exam, and explaining how you have met the coursework and breadth requirements for candidacy. Here is a standardized sample letter (Word .doc, PDF) that you can edit to produce the final cover letter. Besides the information listed in this letter, you should also provide a copy of your porfolio centerpiece and an (unofficial) copy of your Washington University transcript. A printout from WEBSTAC, the university's online student information system, is fine for the latter.

If you are submitting several papers or other written works with your portfolio, please indicate which paper you would like to designate as the centerpiece. Note: If you are not certain which of several papers you should use as your portfolio centerpiece, you may let the Doctoral Program Committee choose among them.

The Director will assign your portfolio to a faculty reviewer (not your advisor). When the reviewer has assessed the portfolio, the Director will bring up your case at a meeting of the CSE faculty. At that time, the faculty will review your total package (portfolio, oral qualifier, and grades in breadth courses) and will then vote on whether to admit you to candidacy. The vote is based on whether, in the faculty's opinion, you have demonstrated the knowledge, ability, and creativity needed to conduct high-quality research in CSE.

There are three possible outcomes to the vote on admission to candidacy:

• Admit to candidacy (possibly with conditions) for the doctoral degree;
• Delay any decision and conduct a second review at some later time (usually within six months);
• Do not admit to candidacy, effectively asking the student to leave the program.

Admission to candidacy may be unconditional or may be conditional on your completing specified additional work. Typically, this work would be intended to remedy a weakness in breadth and would entail demonstrating sufficient mastery in one or more specific courses.

Note: if you are admitted to candidacy before satisfying all doctoral breadth requirements, your admission will be conditional on satisfactory completion of these requirements, as described above, prior to your thesis proposal.

The remaining milestones for our doctoral programs are selection and public proposal of a topic for thesis work and, following appropriate original research, written and oral presentation of a doctoral dissertation.

You must first determine an appropriate topic for a thesis and devise a plan of research, in consultation with your advisor. This plan takes the form of a written thesis proposal, which includes identification of the topic for study, a discussion of appropriate background and previous results in the research area, a summary of your own prior work in the area and any preliminary results, and finally a description of the planned work that will lead to your dissertation. You must present your proposal orally before a doctoral committee of faculty members, who will decide whether to accept the proposal as-is or to require changes in the research plan. Once the proposal is accepted, the committee will supervise your thesis work.

A doctoral committee must contain at least five faculty members, including your advisor, and must include at least one Washington University faculty member from outside of CSE. One of the five required members may be from outside Washington University; additional non-WU members are permitted but do not count toward the required five.

When you have completed your thesis research, you will prepare a written dissertation and defend it orally before your committee. Again, the committee may accept the thesis work as-is (usually with minor corrections) or require revisions. After your thesis is accepted and you have satisfied all credit requirements, you can graduate with your D.Sc. degree.

When you are ready to proceed with these milestones, your advisor will help you to form your committee and to negotiate the necessary administrative hurdles. In particular, written dissertations must follow certain formatting guidelines set by the School of Engineering; for more details, see the SEAS Graduate Catalog. If you would like to see examples of past dissertations, you can borrow them from the Department office. Past thesis proposals are often available as CSE technical reports; ask your advisor how to get these reports.

Besides the major milestones, you have some continuing responsibilities as part of your participation in the doctoral program. These responsibilities are partly to help the faculty assess your progress and partly to help you better prepare for a career in CSE research.

Currently, most admissions to our doctoral programs happen because a particular faculty member or research group agrees to fund a student through current or anticipated research grants. In most cases, the faculty member who agrees to fund your doctoral studies immediately becomes your research advisor, with overall responsibility for directing your research program. However, some students are admitted through other mechanisms, such as fellowships or departmental offers, that are not associated with a particular faculty member. These students are responsible for choosing a research advisor once they arrive.

A student who is admitted without a research advisor is initially assigned to a faculty member who assumes the traditional responsibilities of an academic advisor: helping you choose courses, providing general guidance in the doctoral program, and representing your interests to the CSE faculty and the university as a whole. This relationship is intended to be temporary, while you arrange for a more permanent research advisor. Once you choose a research advisor, that person both takes over academic advising duties and provides resources and guidance to help you formulate and carry out the research that will enable you to pass your milestones. Ideally, you should choose your research advisor before passing your first milestone.

Choosing a research advisor is a momentous decision, and you should be as well-informed as possible when making it. A good match of skills, interests, and personality between the student and the research advisor is critical to successful doctoral research. Discussions with individual faculty members, careful review of recently published papers, participation in research seminars, and advice from the academic advisor and from the Doctoral Program Committee are several avenues by which you can determine who your advisor should be.

The advising relationship is established and continued by the mutual consent of student and faculty member. Whether or not you arrived with a research advisor already chosen, you have the option at any time to seek a new research advisor. If you feel that switching research (or academic) advisors is in your best interest, the faculty will do what we can to try to make the transition possible, beneficial, and amicable for all involved. Similarly, if the faculty member chooses to end the advising relationship, we will help you find a new advisor if possible.

The department's Graduate Student Association organizes a regular (typically bi-weekly) non-credit seminar in which doctoral students present their ongoing research. This seminar provides an informal forum for you to show off your work to your peers, an opportunity to practice the skills of talk preparation and presentation, and (secondarily) an occasion for interested faculty to assess your progress in the program.

Each student who takes CSE 699 or CSE 888 for at least one semester of a given year must present a talk in the seminar and must attend other seminars in the series. Students who take research credits in fall semester typically present in spring, while those who take research credits only in spring present the following fall. The talk requirement is waived if the student is presenting a thesis proposal or defense (M.S. or D.Sc.) in the same year that she becomes eligible to talk in the seminar.

The format of the seminar is two half-hour slots. Each slot is devoted to a conference-style presentation by one student, followed by time for questions. Presentations are typically fairly polished (practicing is strongly recommended). Listeners in the seminar provide anonymous feedback to speakers in the form of comment sheets filled out during the seminar. Talks are announced in advance by posted abstract, which should be sent to the seminar organizer(s) about a week in advance of a presentation.

Students who are not required to present in a given year may (and often do) still choose to do so. Participation by master's students and advanced undergraduates is also possible, given sufficient space in the schedule.

Throughout the year, faculty members invite speakers from other universities and from industry to give public colloquia in the department. These talks are extremely important in helping us to stay abreast of developments in our field and in encouraging productive relationships with researchers outside the department. Some talks also serve as job interviews by applicants for CSE faculty positions.

Doctoral students are expected to attend all talks in the colloquium series. You will have the opportunity to hear about exciting research in your field and to find out about areas in which you might want to work. You will also have the opportunity to critically assess presentations, which will help you learn how to present well yourself. Seeing what works and does not work in job talks is especially useful as you yourself begin to think about applying for jobs.

The obligation to attend colloquia applies less stringently to part-time students, who may not be in the department during our usual colloquium times. However, during the residency period, part-timers will have the full opportunity and obligation to attend.

In the spring semester of each year, the Doctoral Program Committee reviews the progress of all students in the program. The purpose of this review is to ensure that students are making adequate progress toward their degrees, to identify potential trouble spots early enough to respond, and to maintain a uniform expectation from the faculty as a whole about how quickly students should be moving through the milestones of the program.

All doctoral students are asked to fill out a survey form documenting their progress over the last year and their plans for next year to aid in the annual review (download form as Word .doc or PDF). Your submission to the committee must be discussed with and approved by your advisor. In addition to the survey form, you should feel free to include papers, technical reports, or other documentation of your work.

You may also use the annual assessment as an opportunity to raise concerns about your relationship with your advisor or other progress-related issues. You may, if you prefer, raise these issues separately (and, if need be, confidentially) from your advisor-approved submission.

Important note: advisors are strongly urged to let the Doctoral Program Committee know as soon as possible if a doctoral student is in danger of being left unadvised and unfunded or is otherwise having difficulty making progress. Please do not wait for the annual review, since losing an advisor can have not only academic but also financial and immigration implications for the student.

We expect doctoral students to maintain a high standard of academic integrity. This standard includes integrity in both your coursework and your research activities.

You are likely already familiar with the basic obligations of academic integrity as they relate to coursework. Broadly, we expect students to behave ethically and not to subvert the evaluation function of our courses. Each course's instructor determines that course's specific integrity policies, including, e.g., acceptable level of collaboration on assignments, guidelines for seeking outside help, and examination procedures. When in doubt, ask the instructor.

You may be less familiar with the standards for academic integrity in conducting and publishing research. However, these standards are just as important as those for your classwork, and failure to abide by them can destroy your career. Your research advisor is your guide to what is acceptable in your area, but here is an (incomplete) list of basic guidelines to help you get started.

Your research results, published or unpublished, must be true, complete, and accurate to the best of your knowledge. Falsifying or "fudging" data, rigging experiments to produce a desirable outcome, or representing as correct a proof that you know to be flawed, is unacceptable. You should disclose experimental conditions that could materially affect your results.

You may not claim the work of others as your own. Fundamentally, you may not copy or adapt text from another researcher's written work without proper attribution, nor may you claim another's ideas, code, or research results as your own work. You must properly cite others' previous work.

You may not attempt to get credit twice for the same research result. Examples include republishing your previously published paper as novel work, or claiming a result from an earlier paper as novel in a later paper. You must properly cite your own previous work.

In computer science, it is common practice to publish a result first in the proceedings of a refereed professional conference, then later to prepare a journal version of the same paper. Standards vary as to how different the conference and journal versions of a paper need to be to avoid self-plagiarism. A good rule of thumb is that the journal paper should have at least 30% new material; however, consult your research advisor for specific cases.

Note that it is fine to reuse relatively small chunks of your own explanatory text in your later work.

Most academic journals and conferences have policies prohibiting you from submitting work that is already published or currently under review for another journal or conference. It is a violation of academic integrity to ignore or subvert these policies.

You may work on your doctorate while enrolled as a part-time student. This option is intended for people who want to earn their degree while holding down a full-time job. However, the department requires that all doctoral students, even part-timers, complete at least one year's residency in the department to obtain a degree.

Residency requires full participation in the life of the department. For at least one academic year (nine months), you must commit to being in the department for at least 20 hours per week. If you are working, you must reduce the amount of time you spend at work by at least 50% during the residency period. You will have a desk and all the other perks and responsibilities of a full-time doctoral student (e.g. attending colloquia) during your residency.

Full-time doctoral students receiving research assistantships are restricted as to what kinds of work they may do outside of their doctoral research. Students receiving research assistantships are expected to dedicate all their energy to making progress toward their degrees and to contribute to the research activities that provide the funding for their support. As such, only limited effort may be directed to income-generating activities within or outside the university, and only if such activities do not interfere with the student's academic pursuits or general university policies on conflict of interest and conflict of commitment.

The scope of such efforts is limited to one day per calendar week. If the activity involves grading for the department, the one-day-per-week limit translates to no more than 8 hours per week on average.

In all cases, the student has an obligation both to keep her advisor and the department informed about all such extra activities, and to secure the advisor's explicit approval.

The CSE Department participates in the Engineering School's combined B.S./D.Sc. program, intended for exceptional undergraduates who wish to make an early commitment to seek a doctorate in Computer Science or Computer Engineering at Washington University. Students who enter this program should plan to finish their doctorate within seven years of beginning their undergraduate degree.

The following modifications to the usual procedures and requirements of the doctoral program apply only to B.S./D.Sc. students.

1. Although you must fulfill all the usual requirements of the B.S. and D.Sc. degrees, you may double-count courses at 500-level or above toward both your B.S. requirements and the 36-48 course credits needed for the D.Sc.
2. You must maintain an overall GPA of 3.5 to continue with the program each year.
3. You will initially be assigned both a graduate student mentor and a faculty mentor. The latter will likely be your research advisor.

In order to follow the B.S./D.Sc.'s accelerated schedule, you should aim to complete your first milestone, admission to candidacy, around the end of your senior year.

Important note: if you choose to leave the B.S./D.Sc. program, you may receive a master's degree if you have satisfied the requirements. However, the audit for that degree does not permit double-counting, so you will need the full 150 units required for the combined B.S./M.S. degree.