Graduate Information

Initial Enrollment At the time of their first enrollment, most students confer with the Director of Graduate Study. If, however, the student has already established contact with another member of the Graduate Faculty whom he/she would prefer to have as advisor, he/she is encouraged to seek advice from that person. Enrollment in Graduate Courses Graduate work is considerably more demanding and involves much more independent investigation than undergraduate study. For this reason, the student who has been used to carrying fifteen, eighteen or even more hours per semester as an undergraduate must learn to cut down his/her load in graduate school. The department regards twelve credit hours as the normally desirable full-time load in a fall or spring semester; a comparable load in a summer session would be six hours. Graduate Teaching Assistants may reduce their graduate course load according to the amount of time they spend teaching; for half-time Graduate Teaching Assistants for example, nine hours is the expected course load. In order to facilitate satisfactory progress toward a degree, therefore, Graduate Teaching Assistants are ordinarily expected to enroll in a minimum of nine hours.