Graduate Programs

Our graduate program is consistently ranked in the top third of research departments in North America. The program has over 50 faculty and close to 500 graduate students, almost equally divided between Doctoral and M.S. students. Our graduates hold prominent professorships in such universities as Stanford, Yale, Illinois, Texas, and Cornell. Some graduates continue into industry, including prominent positions with the research laboratories of Nokia, AT&T, IBM Yorktown Heights, JPL-Cal Tech, Sony, MERL, and B.B.N. Some have become leaders of professional societies, presidents of distinguished universities, and CEOs of successful companies.

The department philosophy is to build “critical mass” in many important research areas, thereby ensuring the positive effects on research results obtained through collaboration with colleagues. Currently, the most significant of these areas include Visual Computing; Databases, Logic Programming, and Deductive Systems; Concurrency and Verification; Algorithms and Complexity; and Computer Systems, Networking, and Security. The faculty in each of these areas has been recognized internationally for their contributions to their respective fields.

The Ph.D. program is for students interested in obtaining academic or research positions in colleges and universities or in government and commercial research laboratories. The program gives students a rigorous and thorough knowledge of a broad range of theoretical and practical research subject areas, and develops the ability to recognize and pursue significant research in computer science. Practically all students in the PhD program are supported as teaching assistants in the first year followed by a research assistantship on funded projects thereafter.

The M.S. program is designed to train students with professional goals in business, industry, or government. The program concentrates primarily on applied computer science, emphasizing software development, programming, computer systems and applications. With either the thesis or the project option, each student is given the experience of working on a large scale software or hardware development project. Normally M.S. students are not supported, although a few with special qualifications are appointed as TAs, and many other qualified students find jobs around the University assisting with systems support and application development.