MS Degree Planning

Degree Progress & Planning

ISE expects on-campus master’s degree students to complete the degree requirements in two years. The non-thesis option can be completed in 12-18 months.

To formally plan your courses, as well as audit your progress, you can use the U.Achieve system. This system allows you to view courses already taken and how these courses are counting toward your degree. It is a good idea to check this audit often. Courses taken outside of ISE will likely need to be petitioned to count toward requirements – see the section below for information regarding internal petitions. You can also add planned courses to your audit to see how they will fit into your overall degree plan.

As you move toward graduation, this audit will become more and more useful. Please reach out to ise-grad@illinois.edu.

Internal Petitions

Please keep in mind that for non-ISE courses to count toward your degree, you must make your request through an ISE Internal Petition. It is important you complete this petition before you take the coursework you want to count toward your degree.

Sample Plans

The degree requirements in ISE for our MS degrees are very flexible. This is so that the student can pursue courses in his/her research area without constraint. To assist the student, ISE has created several sample curricula, sorted by research area. Keep in mind that these sample curricula are just suggested courses. The student may change/substitute courses as needed to fulfill the needs of his/her career goals. These sample curricula are geared toward non-thesis students. If you are interested in pursuing the thesis option, swap out the independent study for thesis research, and reduce the number of credit hours as needed.