Guidelines/Hints for the Qualifying Exam in the Computer Engineering Area

Committee:

· The committee for the qualifying exam should consist of at least five members, at least one of whom must be from outside the department. In computer engineering area, it is quite common for the outside member to be from the computer science department. Note that the graduate school requires the following:

"Each committee should have at least one member whose teaching and research are principally outside the graduate program, and at least three members, including the supervisor, should be from within the graduate program."

If the person is not in the ECE department, but IS a member of our GSC, they DO NOT satisfy this requirement. Given that, make sure that the member proposed to satisfy the "one member whose teaching and research are principally outside the graduate program" requirement IS NOT A MEMBER OF THE ECE GSC.

· You may have more than five members, for example, when the supervisor thinks that an adjunct faculty or somebody from the industry will be helpful in guiding the research. However, you must have at least four faculty members in the committee, i.e., a committee of five members cannot have more than one adjunct/industry member.

· The supervisor (or a co-supervisor) must be a member of the ECE Graduate Studies Committee.

· The chairman of the committee must be someone from the ECE department and cannot be the supervisor/co-supervisor.

· There must be at least one faculty member (other than the supervisor/co-supervisor)

from the computer engineering area in the committee.

· There must be at least three ECE GSC members in the committee.

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Once you have decided your committee, you must submit the following items to

Melanie Gulick (ENS 101, 232-4297, melanie.gulick@mail.utexas.edu), at least 3 WEEKS in advance of your proposed qualifying exam date.

* Computer Engineering Resume http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~ljohn/phd/CEResume.htm

* Title of the proposed dissertation

* Proposed committee

list of members

name of the supervisor/co-supervisors

name of the chairman of the committee

name of the external member

* If the committee does not satisfy rules outlined above, then a brief justification

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Qualifying exam

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· Give a copy of your proposal to your committee members at least 10 days in advance of your exam. Please keep your proposal write-up concise. I suggest that it be no more than 20 pages.

· Include in your proposal a list of all the courses you have taken at UT (and graduate courses taken elsewhere) with the following information:

o number and name of the course

o name of the instructor,

o the semester the course was taken and

o the grade.

· Make sure that you have reserved a room for the qualifier time.

· Take the form (Report of ECE Ph.D. Qualifying Exam Committee) from the web and give it to the chairman of your committee.

· Send an email reminder to your committee members the day before the exam.