Graduate Student Funding

All graduate students are expected to do supervised research during their studies. Most Ph.D. and some M.S. students receive financial assistance from the department and other sources in the form of research assistantships, teaching assistantships, and system administration assistantships. Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) work with faculty members on externally funded research programs. Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) assist faculty in their teaching duties, usually by grading assignments and teaching recitation sections. Graduate Systems Assistants (GSAs) help administer the shared department computing resources, including the Linux, Mac, and Windows based machines.

All university assistantships include tuition waivers and a competitive stipend.

Most graduate students who are offered funding begin as GTAs or GSAs. We feel it is beneficial to our students to begin as GTAs/GSAs because it provides students and faculty the opportunity to become acquainted and allows students to find research topics of interest to them.

Research groups in the department fund several graduate students, and a general overview of research areas in the department can be found at the department research pages. All research areas and groups listed on the research pages fund students. Research projects that are actively seeking to fund graduate students include:

  • Bioinformatics (Ben-Hur)
  • Network Security (Massey, Papadopoulos)
  • Low Latency Multimedia Communication (Papadopoulos)
  • Network Measurements (Massey, Papadopoulos)
  • Parallelization of Scientific Applications (Strout)
  • Routing, DNS Security (Massey)

GTAs, GRAs, and GSAs are guaranteed funding for the first two years their graduate program, provided they perform their assistantship duties satisfactorily and make adequate progress toward their degree. For all GTAs, GRAs, and GSAs, the department strives to provide continued funding through completion of graduate study, provided the student's research is progressing well. The department requires that all students maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA during their studies. Students who fail to maintain this GPA become ineligible for assistantships.

Other sources of funding include: