If your goal is ultimately to get a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, you should apply to the Ph.D. program. You do not need to already have a Master’s degree to apply to or be admitted to the Ph.D. program.

Note that our admission standards for students applying to the Ph.D. program are higher than for those who are applying to the Master’s program. In particular, for Ph.D. applicants there is a greater emphasis on a broader set of criteria, such as your personal statement, letters of recommendation, and prior research/work experience. Does this mean that you should not apply for the Ph.D. program even if you are ultimately interested in a Ph.D.? We do not recommend this. Financial assistance (in the form of fellowships, teaching assistantships, or research assistantships with ECE faculty) are generally offered only to students applying to the Ph.D. program.

Note, however, that if you are denied admission to the Ph.D. program you will not be automatically considered for the Master’s program.

Yes.

We do not “pre-evaluate” applicants’ qualifications for graduate school in ECE. Requesting evaluations from faculty/staff via email is highly discouraged.

Yes. Given the large number of applications that we receive, the online letters are much easier to track and to disseminate to the faculty who make the admissions and financial aid decisions

We do not require applicants to submit GRE scores. They are not expected, but if you have taken the GREs and would like to include them, they will be considered. Strong GRE scores can potentially help make up for weakness in another area of your application, but GRE scores are not a primary factor in admissions decisions.

Admitted M.S. students can apply for GTA funding after enrollment in the first semester. Students can fill out the position request form at the secured ECE site. Those seeking GRAs are encouraged to reach out directly to faculty with a shared research interest to discuss GRA opportunities. GTA/GRA funding is very limited and is not guaranteed. M.S. students should have an alternative plan for funding their degree.

Most applicants admitted to the Atlanta campus Ph.D. program will receive a GTA or GRA offer. This will be noted in your acceptance letter. In the event funding is not offered, students will need to have an alternate plan for funding their degree. The Office of Graduate Studies fellowships page maintains links to external national fellowships that may be of interest.

Applications, transcripts, test scores, and other application materials sent to Georgia Tech are received and processed by the Georgia Tech Office of Graduate Studies. To check your application status and/or what materials have been received by Georgia Tech, go to the application status checking page. On this page you can view the most current information regarding the status of your application including received materials.

No. The application status checking page shows what has been received and processed. Transcripts must be scanned in order to be added to the database, and some of the data from other documents must be entered manually into the database. This takes time, especially near the application deadlines, since Georgia Tech receives thousands of applications each year, many of them arriving right before the application deadlines. Documents arriving during school holidays and school breaks will not be posted during that time (see a list of upcoming school holidays and breaks). A minimum of 10 working days is typically required to process received documents. Be sure you have allowed sufficient time for the materials to be sent and processed. If any of the materials you sent or arranged to be sent to Georgia Tech are not acknowledged as received, you should contact the Office of Graduate Studies. Do not contact ECE inquiring about the status of these materials as they are received and processed by the Office of Graduate Studies.

Your recommenders submit your letters of recommendation directly to the Georgia Tech Office of Graduate Studies. To check the status of these letters, go to the application status checking page. On this page you can view the most current information regarding the status of your application including received materials. Do not contact ECE regarding the status or your letters of recommendation, as they are received and processed by the Office of Graduate Studies.

For Atlanta campus M.S. and Ph.D. admissions: We will send out decisions as they are made, starting as early as January, with the vast majority completed by late March (for applications for fall admission).

For B.S./M.S. admissions: Admission decisions will be made by the end of the preceding summer semester if not sooner and will be accessible through your Gradapp account. Spring admissions decisions will be relayed by the end of the preceding fall semester and will be accessible through your Gradapp account. Decision available notification is sent to the email address as listed on the application. You are responsible to ensure that this email address remains accessible to receive communications from our office.

As admission decisions are made, some admission decision letters will be available for direct download in Adobe pdf format. If your decision letter is available for download, you will be informed via email and there will be a link provided on the ECE Application Decision Status site to download your letter. If you do not receive an email that your admission decision letter can be downloaded and no link for downloading a letter appears on the ECE Application Decision Status website, your letter will be emailed to you using the email address on the application.

First of all, students do not know all of the details on their own application (specifically, their letters of recommendation) and certainly not the details of another person’s application. When students have contacted us in the past with this question, we find that they are usually mistaken about other student’s records. Even so, we understand that we do deny admission to many excellent students due to program capacity limitations, and this is not a reflection on their qualifications. If a group of students all have equivalent grades and test scores, then other factors will influence the decision, such as: letters of recommendation, the statement of purpose and prior experience, and the alignment between the student’s area of interest and our needs within ECE.

For example, a student may have research or work experience that exactly matches the need of a particular faculty member who has an open research assistantship position. That student may be admitted with lower a GPA and/or test scores than someone else since the experience is weighted more heavily in that case. Alternatively, a particular research concentration area may have a large number of applicants compared to other areas, and we may need to balance the number of students across these areas to align with the needs of our faculty.

Current (enrolled) students, can file a “Position Request” for either a GTA or GRA through the secure ECE website where coursework plans are filed. When applying for a GTA, please enter in the comments section the course numbers of courses for which you feel qualified to be a GTA. Those seeking GRAs should be sure to indicate their TIA preference(s) and are encouraged to make direct contact with faculty researching in their interest area as well as filing a “Position Request.” Incoming students are considered for GTA and GRA positions based on the information provided in the application for admission to graduate school, including their financial need. Incoming students should note that financial aid is very difficult to receive.

In order to be eligible for reduced tuition as a GRA or GTA, the following must occur:

1. Student registration must meet full-time requirements.
2. Student must be hired at a minimum of 1/3 time (13-15 hours per week) and a maximum of 1/2 time (20 hours per week).
3. A residency specific waiver must be recorded by the student’s major school.
4. Having corrected one or more of the above, it may take 24 hours for any fee assessments to be corrected and posted in all Georgia Tech information systems.

The ECE Graduate Affairs Office watches for errors in the enrollment of students who have assistantships. We also strive to be sure that correct waivers are recorded. If you find an error, you should see someone in our office for assistance. You should also watch for email messages indicating that corrections to your schedule, etc. are needed in order to receive the tuition waiver.

Some students work in industry during summer terms or for one semester during their studies in order develop professional expertise and to help pay their educational expenses. You can contact the Center for Career Discovery and Development for more information.

Yes, we strongly encourage students to seek out these opportunities. The Graduate Studies website maintains a list of national fellowships (for U.S. citizens/permanent residents) many of which are available for current graduate students who are at the beginnings of their studies. Information on other opportunities (such as funding for doctoral students) is also be available on that site.

All announcements that we receive regarding job opportunities and fellowships, as well as non-academic news items, will be forwarded to a news group. In order to receive these messages, you will need to join the "news_grads @ ece.gatech.edu" mailing list.

Below are the instructions:

1. Go to https://lists.gatech.edu

2. Login

3. Search for news_ugrads

4. Click on "news_grads@lists.gatech.edu"

5. On the taskbar on the left side, click "Subscribe"

If you want to unsubscribe, you can do so from the same interface.

The tuition and fees are posted at Tuition and Fees.

Estimates of the cost of attending Georgia Tech, including housing, are at Cost of Attendance.

The amount noted on your VISA is the amount for the first year at Georgia Tech. You will be required to pay tuition and fees for each year and can refer to the bursar’s website for information on tuition and fees.

Please refer to the bursar’s website at: Understanding Your Account

Please refer to the bursar’s website for payment information at: Payment Options

ECE at Georgia Tech offers courses in 11 different specializations, called "Technical Interest Groups". Courses can be searched for on the ECE Course Information page. Not every course is offered every year. Consult the current course schedule for the list of projected courses.

The ECE Graduate Affairs Office provides academic advisement. Students pursuing the M.S. thesis option or the Ph.D. degree will seek research advisors from ECE faculty (see “How do I find a research advisor?" below).

Prior to the start of each academic term, an academic advisement is held for new students. All Atlanta-based students are required to attend the advisement program.

The main academic advising regarding the meeting of academic requirements, including degree requirements, is done by the Graduate Admissions Office in Atlanta. Additional advising is available on all satellite campuses.

Advising hours for the ECE Graduate Affairs Office are from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Students seeking advisement may “walk in” during those hours. Specific appointments can also be made via email request. Please note that not everyone in the office is always available during office hours, but that every effort will be made to assist students who come to the office.

If you want to meet with the ECE Associate Chair for Graduate Affairs, you should make an appointment. In addition to providing faculty supervision to the Graduate Affairs Office, the Associate Chair is frequently on many ECE and Georgia Tech committees, in addition to advising students conducting research under his/her supervision, and other responsibilities.

ECE also holds advisement sessions for continuing students prior to each registration period. Announcements for these sessions are sent to the student body by email.

You should submit your course plan by drop day of your first semester at Georgia Tech. This would preempt you from taking a course that would not be counted toward your degree. It is important to click on the “campus” when submitting a coursework plan. The system will not update the plan unless a campus is selected.

Changes can be made to a coursework plan. When changes other than adding grades earned or term/year of completion of a class (or classes) are made, the plan should be submitted for review again. Please be sure to click “revised” when changing classes on the coursework plan.

Up to 6 hours of graduate work taken at an ABET-approved college may be transferred toward an M.S. degree. M.S. students who wish to transfer classes must provide a transcript showing completion of the classes to be transferred, a letter from the registrar at the school where the classes were taken which certifies that the classes were not used toward a degree at that school, and a course outline for each course to be transferred. A completed “Request for Transfer Credit” form should also accompany the materials submitted.

Students seeking the Ph.D. degree may use classes from their M.S. degree programs toward the Ph.D. This is done by listing the M.S. courses on the Ph.D. coursework plan. M.S. courses are listed with the name, number (if one was used), letter grade, semester hours, term, and year of completion for each class. Classes to be completed at Georgia Tech are also listed on the coursework plan. The ECE Graduate Affairs Office will review the Ph.D. coursework plan and determine whether the M.S. classes can be used toward the Ph.D. coursework requirement. Once the Ph.D. coursework plan is approved, it serves as an agreement between ECE and the student to use the M.S. classes toward the Ph.D. coursework requirement. The M.S. classes applied toward the Ph.D. coursework requirement are not transferred and will never show on the Georgia Tech transcript. It may be necessary to provide additional information before we make a final approval decision. It is very helpful to provide the ECE Graduate Affairs Office with an original, official copy of the final transcript from the M.S. school.

In order to count M.S. thesis hours toward the Ph.D. coursework requirement, we must have a transcript that lists the M.S. thesis research hours on it. We will also want to see an English version of the M.S. thesis. Up to 12 hours of M.S. thesis research could be applied to the Ph.D. coursework plan under Group IV (Electives).

We do not assign research advisors to students; we allow students to select their own advisors. Some faculty members contact students prior to arrival on campus and agree to support the student as a Graduate Research Assistant. In most cases, students arrive on campus without an advisor and select their advisors by taking courses from different faculty members or by doing a Special Problems course with a specific faculty member (this is an independent study course). Many faculty do not agree to support students until after they pass the preliminary exam.

When an entering student is hired by a faculty member, the commitment is three semesters with that faculty member. The faculty member has invested time and money in the student, so we strongly discourage students from switching advisors. If there is a definite problem between the advisor and student, then a candid talk with the advisor is necessary. The ECE Graduate Affairs Office is willing to assist in the discussions between the student and advisor to see if an agreement can be made or to assist in switching advisors if an agreement cannot be made.

Additional information relating to advisement may be found in the Graduate Student Handbook

Additional information about policies, as well as forms and other resources, can be found in the Current Students section of the ECE website.

Degree requirements for M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are available online

ECE does not stipulate which M.S. option students should pursue. Some faculty may require the M.S. thesis of students researching under their direction. Occasionally, a student sponsored by an outside entity may be required by the sponsor to do an M.S. thesis. Students who want to document research abilities may opt to undertake the M.S. thesis option.

The ECE Graduate Student Handbook contains detailed information regarding the requirements for the Ph.D. Coursework Qualifier.

Follow the directions on the Proposal Guidelines document and be sure to update the Ph.D. coursework plan along with preparing the proposal and related forms for submission.

Yes, by submitting a revised "Admission to Ph.D. Candidacy form," you can change the title, abstract, and/or committee. Just mark the “revised” spot and follow the directions.

Additional information relating to degree requirements may be found in the ECE Graduate Student Handbook.

Additional information about policies as well as forms (such as the Course Work Planning form) and other resources can be found in the Current Students section of the ECE website.

No classes can be added to a student’s schedule after the close of registration for a term. This also applies to increasing hours of variable hour classes or changing the grade basis (letter, pass/fail, audit) of a class. See the appropriate Registration Calendar on the Georgia Tech Official School Calendar for specific dates.

Classes removed from the schedule during the registration period will not show on the Georgia Tech transcript. Classes dropped after the close of registration will show on the transcript with a “W” grade. In fall and spring semesters, “drop day” (the last day to drop a class) is the seventh (7th) Friday of the term. In summer, drop day is the fifth (5th) Friday of the term. See the appropriate Registration Calendar on the Georgia Tech Official School Calendar for specific dates.

The Georgia Tech Registrar’s Office sets a deadline by which students who must leave school have to withdraw. This deadline is recorded on the Georgia Tech Official School Calendar. If extenuating circumstances develop after the withdrawal deadline, one may be able to petition to withdraw late. Full-time students who withdraw from school are expected to remain out of school in the following term as well.

New students register during the week before each term starts and during the first week of classes. Continuing students are able to register for the next term near the midpoint of the current term. Continuing students may also register (or make schedule changes) during the late registration period, but it is best to register during the early period. See the appropriate Registration Calendar on the Georgia Tech Official School Calendar for specific dates

Three marker courses are used to document student research efforts:

ECE 8900 is used by students who have GRAs (occasionally GTAs) and fellowships who haven’t passed the Ph.D. preliminary exam yet but want to document research activity.

ECE 7000 is used by students who have selected an M.S. thesis advisor and are undertaking research toward an M.S. thesis.

ECE 9000 is used by students who have passed the Ph.D. preliminary exam and have selected a Ph.D. research advisor.

All of these classes are “variable hour” ones. When first adding one of the markers to the schedule for a term, it will be listed as 1 (one) hour. Students must go back to the registration menu and select “Change Course Option” and increase the hours there.

You can. Submitting bank statements to Georgia Tech’s Graduate Admissions Office soon after you have been admitted oftentimes speeds up F1 and J1 VISA requests

We receive between 2,000 and 3,000 applications each year, and due to space and financial limitations, we must decline many qualified applicants. The decision to accept is based on many factors including the GPA, the letters of recommendation, the GRE, the area of interest of the student, the TOEFL, available funding for students who want to pursue a Ph.D., specific faculty interest in the student, and available space. Many of these factors are not visible to students. With so many applicants, we cannot give specific feedback for any one student. Please read carefully the questions in the Admissions section above for more information on acceptance decisions.

You will need to provide original bank statements in English indicating the type of account. We accept checking and/or savings accounts only that are liquid assets. We do not accept stocks, bonds, money market funds, real estate, or the like. The funds MUST be liquid, meaning that they are quickly converted to cash and easily withdrawn. The statements cannot be older than 9 (nine) months, and if the account is a checking account, you must provide 6 (six) months of original bank statements. Also acceptable is a letter printed on bank letterhead, signed and dated by an officer of the bank, certifying that the person (name) maintains a savings account at that institution; the letter must state the account number and the total cash balance. Financial documents can be from different banks. An affidavit is needed if the account is in a different person’s name.

VISA requests are not made until after you have accepted ECE’s offer for admission. Acceptance of our offer can be made via email, fax, or regular mail. It takes approximately 2 to 3 weeks for the processing and receipt of VISAs, depending upon the workload. They are then sent directly to you at the address provided on your admissions application.

Fill out the ECE Graduate Affairs Office Contact Form for Application Questions and Prospective Students to request that your VISA be sent to another address, giving us the complete address.

An affidavit is a dated and signed statement from your sponsor(s) that he/she is willing to support your education at the Georgia Institute of Technology. An affidavit is needed to accompany financial documents for your VISA request if you are not paying for your own education.

This total dollar amount listed for all of the sponsors must be at least the cost of a full year’s education at Georgia Tech, which can be found at the Bursar’s Office Tuition and Fees web page. The amount varies if you have been offered an assistantship by ECE.

The Office of International Education serves various needs of international students

• Graduate Admissions
• Georgia Tech Graduate Studies Office
• Georgia Tech Housing
• Georgia Tech Health Services
  • Required immunizations
  • Medical Insurance Requirements

If your question still has not been answered, please fill out the appropriate form:

• ECE Graduate Affairs Office Contact Form for Application Questions and Prospective Students
• Contact the ECE Graduate Affairs Office - Current Students