This page provides answers to some common questions asked by students pursuing a masters degree in the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University. The questions below have answers provided by faculty, staff, and other students.

If you have a question not covered here, or you think there's something missing that ought to be mentioned, please contact the maintainer of these pages, Dan Ellis <dpwe@ee.columbia.edu>

Please note that this a new resource as of September 2004; we will be filling in answers to the questions over the next few weeks. Also, please be wary of possible errors in these first drafts - you can't consider the information on these pages as definitive (yet).

The FAQ

1 Meta

• 1.1 What is covered in this FAQ? [dpwe - 2004-08-30]
• 1.2 What other resources are available? [dpwe - 2004-08-31]
• 1.3 How do I add a new question/answer to the FAQ? [dpwe - 2004-08-31]

2 The Columbia EE MS Degree

• 2.1 What are the specific requirements for the MS degree? [dpwe - 2004-09-03]
• 2.2 What courses are excluded and why? [dpwe - 2006-10-26]
• 2.3 What is academic advising for, and how does it work? [dpwe - 2004-09-05]
• 2.4 How can I get involved in research? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 2.5 How do the 'projects classes' (ELEN E4998 etc.) work? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 2.6 How can I get help with internships/finding a job? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 2.7 How do I get into the Doctoral program? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 2.8 What is the Doctoral Qualifying Exam? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 2.9 What kinds of financial aid exist? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 2.10 What is the English Proficiency Requirement? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]

3 Choosing your program

• 3.1 How do I choose which courses to take? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 3.2 Why is there a mix of 3 and 4.5 credit classes? [dpwe - 2005-09-15]
• 3.3 What are concentrations? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 3.4 What information does the SEAS Bulletin provide? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 3.5 What are the GPA requirements? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]

4 Credits and registration

• 4.1 What happens if I need to register for 6 credits to complete my degree? Do I still get university housing? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]
• 4.2 If I complete more than 30 credits, can I transfer the excess credits? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]

5 International students

• 5.1 What is the difference between CPT and OPT? Can I do CPT as part of my MS program? [dpwe - 2005-08-14]

Contributing

Answers to common questions are prepared by filling in a template file (which is actually XML, for no particularly compelling reason). Answer files have an arbitrary file name, but with an extension of ".xml". They are put in the "anssrc" subdirectory of the main FAQ directory, /proj/eedept1/WWW/lib-ee/ee-site/ms/faq/ .

These source files are then automatically translated into HTML and an index file is built at the same time by running "make" in the main directory. A second plain-text source file, MSEE_FAQ gives hints for the ordering of the questions within the index page. For a contributed answer to be listed against one of the queries in this list, the TITLE field of the answer XML file must exactly match the question in the hints file. Multiple answers to the same question are supported.

Please feel free to suggest new questions or other changes to the hints file, and provide new answer content, by sending them to the maintainer, Dan Ellis <dpwe@ee.columbia.edu>.