Welcome to the PhD Program Bible of the Computer Science Department at Stanford. This is a page maintained by your representatives in the Ph.D. program committee, aiming to clarify and facilitate your struggle through the PhD program. That is, assuming you're a PhD student in the department; otherwise, it's just horror fiction. The maintainers of this page for the 2007-2008 academic year are Cristian Cadar and Jeremy Gillula.
The current, most recent, official description of the graduation requirements can be found in [1], some of which are not dated. If since then we have found things that have changed, we will attempt to keep you up-to-date here and, perhaps, bring a little more light to the darkness, which is inherent in official documents.
First off, you have to spend some time in the department. In other words, you need a number of units, before you can graduate. As you can see in [1], this is purely a financial requirement and is highly unlikely to be an obstacle to your graduation. Also, keep in mind that if you've done a Masters here, prior to your PhD, your time in the Masters program does count towards your residency. Which means that, if you've been a good, productive Masters student and you get into the PhD program afterwards, you can graduate in 5 years altogether. Pretty neat huh?
There is another university requirement that you might have missed because its buried in Doctoral Course Requirements section of the Application for Candidacy for Doctoral Degree form. Although the department has no specific course requirements, you must have taken courses by at least four (4) faculty members that are 3 or more units each. Note that CS 499 independent study also counts for this "diversity" requirement, so most students have two faculty members from taking CS 499 with Motwani their first quarter and their advisor. Note that classes taught by graduate students, department lecturers, visiting faculty, and industry guests DO NOT count toward this four faculty member requirement.
This is not really a heavy requirement. During your first quarter in the program you are required to attend a series of presentations by the department faculty, describing their current research. This requirement aims to jumpstart your understanding of what is going on in the department, and to help you narrow down your list of potential advisors. You can find more information on the course website; find a link from the Autumn course list: http://cs.stanford.edu/Courses/.
This is officially called the Breadth Requirement by the requirements. The general blurb in [1] describes how this aims to "to ensure that each graduate of the program has adequate knowledge of the core areas in the field of Computer Science". Please take a look at our own Comps Central for more up-to-date information.
This is officially called the Depth Requirement by the requirements. There are 5 different qualifying exams, one for each area of specialization (some of them have coalesced into one qual). You probably already know which qual you must take; if you don't, ask your advisor, especially in those cases where there's overlap (such is the case between the Database Qual and the Systems Qual). For more detailed information about specific quals, distilled experience of your fellow PhD students and such, take a look at Quals Central.
You must file candidacy by the end of your second year. You may file early if you have completed 6 of your comprehensive exams. You need to fill out this form.
When you finish both your comps and quals, you may get your Master of Science Degree. To do so, you need to fill out this form and give it to Claire Stager in Gates 182. Note that the form needs to be completed before deadline to apply to graduate, so do not wait until the last minute to complete it. There currently (2007-2008) is a $50 fee adding a Masters program to your PhD. Do not forget to "Apply to Graduate" for your Master program as well as your PhD program in Axess when its time to graduate.
You must complete at least 100% time as a Course Assistant (CA), Teaching Assistant (TA), or instructor (TF). This may be done via two 50% assistantships or one 50% and two 25% assistantships and so on. You may also aim to graduate with a Distinction in Teaching honor. There is no form for this requirement, just make sure you send an email to Kathi DiTommaso (kathi@cs.stanford.edu) and tell her of your intent.
Reading committee: When you feel that you know what specific topic you want your dissertation to focus on (and presumably have done enough work on it to realize its feasibility), you form your reading committee. This committee has three responsibilities:
Your primary advisor must be on your reading committee, as well as two other readers. You must submit this form when you have decided on your committee. To change who you want on your committee, please fill out this form. If you want someone who is not on the Stanford Academic Council (read: not a faculty member) on your committee, you need to fill out this petition.
An important thing to remember when forming your reading committee: All faculty in the EECS department at the University of California at Berkeley are preapproved to be in your reading committee. If you have a relationship to Berkeley faculty, you're welcome to ask them to be in your committees.
For example, you can have a chair from Electrical Engineering, but that chair cannot have a full or joint appointment in Computer Science. More over, your adviser and Chair cannot share joint appointments in the same department either. However, a chair from EE can have a courtesy appointment in CS. Your chair can also be Professor Emeritus from EE or any other department other than CS but may not have a full/ joint appointment in the student's or adviser's department.
At least two weeks before your scheduled orals, you need to submit this form along with a copy of an abstract of your dissertation to the Graduate Admissions office. You should also post an announcement of your orals to phd@cs.stanford.edu and faculty-plus@cs.stanford.edu, containing the title of your talk, an abstract, and the time and location of the exam. Make sure to post from your xenon (@cs.stanford.edu) account so your mail will not be bounced by the filters.
Orals usually last roughly 2.5 hours. You deliver your one-hour talk to your committee and the rest of the audience. After a break, you reconvene for the private part of the examination with your committee, which usually lasts an hour at the longest.
Remember that you can invite UC Berkely faculty to be in your orals committee without further approval requirements.
When preparing your dissertation, you need to follow these guidelines.
Moving on to actually writing your thesis, you absolutely, positively have to take a look at [2]. It talks about a LaTeX thesis style that meets the University's requirements. It also contains some very useful pointers, if you've actually reached the thesis writing stage, including a MS Word version of the style file. The word on the street [no pun intended] is previous students had "issues" with Word---not surprising because it won't be as strict as TeX on the spacing. (Hey, you're CS, what are you doing using Word anyway?)
When you done with everything but your oral defense and your dissertation, you can optionally advance to TGR (Terminal Graduate Registration) Status. This will save your advisor some tuitition costs. If you are in TGR status for over a year, you will need to justify the delay in your research. TGR status will be monitored. To advance to TGR status, you need to fill out this form. To enroll for the special TGR course (CS 802 : TGR Dissertation) in Axess, make sure you click the "Display Independent Study Sections" check box in the search form. You have to select the section of CS 802 that corresponds to your advisor. It should be in the list.
When you done with everything but your dissertation, you can optionally advance to Graduate Quarter status. This will currently (2007-2008) reduce your tuition to $100. You can only have this status for one quarter. To advance to Graduate Quarter status, you need to fill out this form and apply to graduate in Axess (see below). Similar to TGR quarters, you should enroll in CS 802: Dissertation in Axess, see details above.
This page was originally constructed by Petros Maniatis and Diane Tang. For comments, updates, contributions, please contact Cristian Cadar (cristic at Stanford) and Jeremy Gillula (jgillula at Stanford).
Much thanks to our former maintainers: Neil Daswani, Austen McDonald, Brian Carlstrom.
We've received many helpful comments and contributions from the following, in order of appearance: Tamara Munzner, Vincent Laviano, Peche Turner, Erin O'Brien, Mema Roussopoulos.