Advanced Emphasis Requirement

Students must include in the plan of study a well-defined advanced concentration area. Successful completion of this requirement should enable the student to do basic or applied research in a significant contemporary area in information technology.

The doctoral supervisory committee and the Senior Associate Dean of the Volgenau School of IT & Engineering must approve a plan of study. These approvals must occur before a student completes the courses in the area of concentration. There is no guarantee that courses taken before this approval will be accepted.

Students must take a set of 24 credit hours of graduate-level course work that are independent of the qualifying exams taken by the student. (That is, if a student takes a qualifying exam related to OR 541, then OR 541 cannot be counted as 3 credit hours of specialty course work.) A GPA of 3.5 is required in these 24 credit hours. The plan of study may include at most 3 credit hours of directed reading course work. At least 12 of the 24 credit hours must be in courses numbered 700 or higher, and these 12 credit hours cannot include directed-reading, project, or thesis courses. The courses listed below cannot be included in the plan of study.

Courses that cannot be included in any plan of study are any INFS 500-level courses; IT 500 and 599; OR 540; STAT 510, 512, and 530; and SYST 500. Exceptions to any of these rules must be approved in advance by the Senior Associate Dean.

Each Ph.D. student is allowed to designate an emphasis from among the titles of the M.S. degree programs offered by the Volgenau School of IT & Engineering.

We offer the following concentrations for students in the PhD in Information Technology program:

• Information Systems
• Information Security Assurance
• Software Engineering