Student Background

Students in the Ph.D. program in Computation, Organization and Society (COS) are expected to come from industry, government or directly from undergraduate programs. Students must have an undergraduate and/or master level degree in any of the following areas: computer science, computational social science, physics, information science/technology, biology, mathematics, or a mathematical/computational government or policy program. In other words, students are expected to already have had a solid exposure to computation and math/science. Students apply to the program because of their desire to do research at the confluence of computer science, management, social science, law and/or policy. Students are expected to generally be pioneers who are unsatisfied with traditional degree programs and have strong interest in interdisciplinary resarch incorporating vigorous computational approaches.

Prerequisites

Students come from disparate backgrounds, thus depending on the background, a student may have to take additional courses to gain competency sufficient to enroll in star courses. Particular attention is paid to programming and data structures.

The general prerequisites are as follows:

• Evidence of proficiency in computer science at an undergraduate level with emphasis on software or hardware systems.
• Evidence of intellectual ability to succeed in a rigorous, high-quality doctoral program, primarily demonstrated through transcripts and standardized test scores (such as GREs).
• Intense desire to explore the computational problems within a complex real-world system of people, organizations, and policies or to explore complex real-world issues using computational techniques. This should be demonstrated by your statement of purpose, practical experience, background and/or real-world experience.
• Evidence of proficiency in a social, organizational, managerial or policy science at an undergraduate level.
• Evidence of interest in and experience in having done some research.