Courses and Master’s Project

 

COURSEWORK

MS-PSD students are required to either:

  • complete eight courses plus a master’s thesis project for the thesis track OR
  • complete nine courses with no master’s thesis project for the coursework track.

Students choose from quarterly course offerings in physical sciences departments. For students on the master’s thesis track, at least five of their eight courses must be graduate-level courses, with four or more of the graduate courses in a single department or associated with a specific interdepartmental track, such as environmental science, biochemistry/physics, computational methods in physical science, and optics/imaging. Students on the advanced coursework track must take nine courses with at least six of the courses in a single department or associated with a specific interdepartmental track. To accommodate students who seek to broaden their knowledge of the physical sciences as well as those seeking to transition to a new field, students may be allowed to take as many as three advanced undergraduate courses in fields outside of their undergraduate majors.  In all cases the Director must approve the chosen curricula.

Students may take no more than two courses in Statistics, Financial Mathematics, Computational and Applied Mathematics, Computational Analysis and Public Policy, or the Master’s Program in Computer Science. Students who are interested in focusing in these areas should apply directly to those programs.

 

For the Thesis Track:

For experimentalists a typical master’s project might consist of performing or assisting with a laboratory research experiment.  For theorists a typical master’s project might consist of performing some numerical simulation experiments.  Students normally choose their projects in the autumn or winter quarter, carry them out during the winter and spring quarter, and summarize their projects’ results in a required master’s paper.

 

For the Coursework Track:

Students must take a total of nine courses, with six of them in the concentration department, obtaining a letter grade of B or higher in each. The program director must approve the choice of these courses.