Graduate Independent Study - Registration Steps
Each student must accomplish the following steps to be considered officially registered for the CSC Graduate Independent Study:
- Sign up for the Independent Study course, CSC 9020, through the regular registration process.
- Determine your project topic and advisor.
- With input from your advisor, complete the Independent Study Project Description Form. Before completing the form, you must be registered for the course, and you must log in to our department website. Note that your topic, advisor, title, and description will be publically available through our department website.
- Your advisor must approve your topic, title, and description by logging onto our department website and choosing the IS Approval fuction.
The IS Project Description must be approved no later than 30 days (for fall and spring semesters) or 14 days (for summer semester) after the semester begins. It may take several days to find an advisor and finalize your topic. Therefore you should begin the process of finding an advisor and topic immediately when the semester begins; preferably sooner.
The Independent Study course does not have to be the last course you take for your degree, though some early course work is strongly suggested to give the IS project a strong foundation. Typically the Independent Study course is taken after you have completed all of your core courses and at least a few electives. You may want to consider the thesis option, in which you take one less regular course and extend your IS project topic into a full thesis.