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Materials Science and Engineering
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Degree Requirements

All students in the program are required to complete a total of 30 credits. This includes a core curriculum of four 3-credit courses, usually taken in the first year. Two of these courses consist of the sequence of Advanced Materials Principles I and Advanced Materials Principles II, which provides a theoretical foundation in the relationship of material structure to its thermal, electrical, optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties as well as an overview of materials synthesis and processing techniques. Students also take Materials Characterization, which covers experimental techniques for characterizing materials with an emphasis on microscale and nanoscale characterization. The final required course is Modeling and Simulation of Materials, which covers computational techniques for modeling material properties at both the micro- and macro-scale. Consistent with Graduate School policy, a student’s overall graduate GPA must be 3.0 or greater.

Students are also required to complete 18 credits of faculty-mentored research which culminate in the completion and defense of a master’s thesis. The expectation is that the thesis research produces new scientific and/or technical results that are of a quality suitable for publication in a respected peer-reviewed journal. 17 of these credits come from the variable-credit course Graduate Thesis Research and 1 credit comes from the course Graduate Thesis Defense that is taken in the final semester before graduation. For full-time students, the program is designed to be completed in two years.