• Please read my page of Information for Prospective Graduate Students.
• Please note that even if I have been assigned as your academic advisor (see below), I cannot answer questions about what forms you need for admission. Please contact the admissions office directly, or if they cannot answer a question, Ms. Iris Torres at netorres@uic.edu.
• With regard to course selection, I always give the same four pieces of advice:
  • Master's students need to take 400- and 500-level courses; to graduate, ME students must have a total of at least 3 500-level courses in the department. IE students need a total of 4 500-level courses, but only two need to be in the department. Both ME and IE courses count as in the department for both majors. There is no core set of classes that all Master's students take. IE grad students cannot take IE471 for credit.
  • You should seek advice from students who have taken the courses before, they have a much better idea of what courses are good ones. If you are a foreign national, the student association from your home country is a good place to start.
  • You should shop around for courses -- attend class in many courses the first week, then decide which you want to take. Pay attention to the add and drop days. In general, graduate classes do not get overenrolled.
  • If you want to get financial assistance from a particular professor, take a class with them and impress them (this is not a guarantee, but it is a good starting point!).
• If I have any positions available for graduate students, they will be advertised on my homepage.
• I may have been assigned as your temporary academic advisor. If so, you need to know what this means. Read on.
• Your academic advisor signs your course registration form each term, thus allowing the office to remove your registration hold and allowing you to register for courses. While you should meet with me to discuss your choice of courses, you should not assume that I will pick them for you. You have access to the same graduation requirements in the catalog that I do; please review them. For entering students beginning in the fall, it may not be convenient to find me for a signature. The office staff in 2039 ERF can sign for me on those occasions.
• Almost all the official information is available on the web.
• Other graduate students are almost always your best source of information.
• Your academic advisor is NOT responsible for helping you to procure financial support. That being said, here is some advice for those who want financial support:
  About the only way to get financial support (research assistantship, teaching assistantship, or tuition waiver) within the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department is for a professor to sponsor you. To clarify what I have said above, I never sponsor a student for the sole reason that he or she is my academic advisee. The best way to convince a professor to sponsor you is to take a class the professor teaches and impress the professor. I personally find student resumes to be useless in making these decisions.
• A few definitions:
  • Research assistantship (RA): An RA receives a stipend and works for a professor doing research. Tuition fees are waived.
  • Teaching assistantship (TA): A TA receives a stipend and has duties connected to a course, usually grading and office hours. Tuition fees are waived. A TA is supervised by the course instructor. However, the course instructor is often NOT the sponsoring professor. A TA usually also works for the sponsoring professor, doing research.
  • Tuition waiver (TW): A student can receive a waiver of tuition fees but no stipend. Again, the student on TW usually works doing research for the sponsoring professor. Also called a TFW (Tuition and Fee Waiver).
  • General Assistantship (GA): This is the one form of financial assistantship that the student seeks directly. A GA student works for twenty hours a week, usually on something that is not related to thesis research. There are GA's sponsored by many departments, but they are rare in Engineering. I suggest that graduate students talk to their more senior student colleagues about seeking GA's. This is the most common kind of financial assistance for Master's students.
• Professors have fixed and limited numbers of TA's and TW's that they may sponsor. The number of RA's that a professor has available depends on their level of external funding.
• In general, professors are more interested in sponsoring PhD students than Masters' students. At least, I know this is true for me; I currently support only PhD students on RA or TA.

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