Frequently Expressed Concerns of MS ME students:

ME300AB (CME200/204) is not a requirement for the MS, and there are other options available.

From Mark Cutkosky:
"For students interested in robotics, state-space controls, vision, graphics, a good alternative to ME300A is CS205 (Mathematical Methods for Robotics, Vision & Graphics)."

From Kos Ishii:
"For those people interested in dfM / Life-cycle / reliability kind of stuff, I recommend them to take Stat 110, which is on the approved list of math courses. Most of my Ph.D. students have taken it (Kmenta, Esterman, et al). Another class I suggest is CS137, numerical analysis--I took it in 1981, was very useful for my work at Toshiba 82-85."

From Tom Kenny:
"If you find a class which seems like it should satisfy the math requirement, and it also fits your program plans in a unique way, you should contact your advisor to see about getting it approved. Nothing outside the rules is ever easy, but most things are actually possible."

"The three-quarter MS program is a myth."

In fact, taking 45 units in three quarters is a very challenging task. Many students decide to spread their units out into four or even five quarters. Statistics show that about 50% of the MS students finish in three quarters. There are many students from each group who will insist they made the right decision.

Reasons to spread it out :
"There is more time to learn and enjoy the material being offered."
"15 units is an unreal workload if project classes are included."
"TA or RA opportunities cannot be fit into three quarters."

Reasons to finish in three quarters:
"Money."
"There are great job opportunities in the spring."
"Sure, 15 units was a lot of work each quarter, but it was manageable."

Final comment: No advisor can tell you if a three-quarter program is better than a four- or five-quarter program for you. You have to experience things for yourself and decide which is best based on your experiences. The best advice is to keep your options open and decide on a path after you've had a little experience with our program. Of course, about 50% of the MSME students do finish in three quarters.

"Many of the courses have strange sign-up procedures, and can be hard to get into without doing the right thing."

Well, many of the courses do have sign-up sheets offered in various places and in various ways. The best thing to do is to contact instructors of classes you're planning to take, and get the info from them. In many cases, the sign-up sheets in Bldg 530 are used to help determine how many copies of the handouts will be needed the first day, and not to assign priority for getting into the class. Therefore, it is not really necessary to be there early in the morning the day before classes in order to get into a class. It is important to be on the list, but go and sign up at a reasonable time. And if you're not sure, ask the instructor for info. In the near future, all of these sign-up sheets will be replaced with things on the web, so be on the lookout for that.

"You should not take more than one project course at a time."

Many students follow this advice, and many others do not. You can find past students who enthusiastically defend both sides of this position. It is true that project courses tend to be more "open-ended" than normal classes, and that it is possible to spend infinite amounts of time in project classes. However, you are not required to spend infinite time in these classes, and part of the content of these classes is learning how to contain the effort and not impact other things in your life. In recent years, there has been much discussion of this problem among the faculty, and we have agreed to design the specifications of projects in these classes so that they may be completed within a reasonable number of hours given the units in each class. You may choose to spend excessive time in these classes completing extraordinary designs. However, the faculty teaching other classes are not going to accept this as an excuse for not completing an assignment in their class.


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