Admission requirements

Students applying to the grad tracj option should be majors in the department’s Computer Engineering, BS  program. Students are eligible for acceptance at the end of their junior year. Approval will be considered once a student has completed at least 75 credit hours. One benchmark is whether or not the student is ready for CSE Senior Design in the following fall semester. Other requirements include:

• A minimum cumulative GPA of 3.5 or higher is required at the time of application.
• A minimum cumulative GPA of 3.5 for all computer science core courses.
• A statement of purpose.
• Three letters of recommendation from computer science and engineering faculty members.

The student’s application will be reviewed by an undergraduate and a graduate coordinator in computer science and engineering. Once approved by the CSE coordinators, the student must apply to the Toulouse Graduate School within the first semester of the senior year.

Program policies

After completing at least 90 credit hours, the student can start taking the accepted graduate courses as technical electives for the BS degree. If the student wants to take other graduate courses for grad track credits, they will need to obtain approvals from both the undergraduate and graduate CSE coordinators. For these graduate courses to be counted for the MS degree, the student must earn a grade of B or higher for each course. Courses cross-listed as graduate/undergraduate must be taken at the graduate level to be counted for graduate credit.

Students admitted to the grad track option will be admitted into the MS program on a conditional basis. Once the student has satisfied all coursework for the BS degree and maintained a 3.0 GPA or higher, they will be fully admitted to the graduate program. Undergraduate students who have been accepted into a grad track program should complete all of the bachelor’s degree requirements and graduate within 12 months of the first day of the semester for which they began taking graduate courses, or enrollment in graduate-level coursework will be suspended.

Students must enroll in graduate school in the long semester after finishing the BS degree and should take the remaining graduate courses in the following year(s) to complete the MS degree. If the student does not enroll in graduate school in the long semester after finishing the BS degree, those graduate course credit hours will not be counted for the MS degree, even if the student comes back for graduate school in the future.

Program requirements

The student is required to take three of the courses listed below in the fourth year of their bachelor’s degree program: 

• CSCE 5200 - Information Retrieval and Web Search

• CSCE 5210 - Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence

• CSCE 5215 - Machine Learning

• CSCE 5290 - Natural Language Processing

• CSCE 5380 - Data Mining 

All remaining courses for Computer Engineering, BS  must be completed.