PhD Degree Planning

Degree Progress/Milestones

ISE expects PhD degree students to complete the degree requirements in 4-5 years, with those students entering with an MS degree finishing sooner than those without. You can use our PhD Timeline Tool to get an idea of when you should complete your major PhD milestones. 

Course Planning

To formally plan your courses, as well as audit your progress, you can run a degree audit from the Graduate College Student Portal. 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. 

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.

Courses (Master & By Discipline)

You can download the ISE Graduate Course Spreadsheet to view courses by research discipline, term offering, etc. Please keep in mind that this spreadsheet is not a substitute for Course Explorer information and you should check each semester for actual offerings.

The Grainger College of Engineering also maintains a list of courses and syllabi that you can check out as well.