To earn an MCDS degree, student must pass courses in the core curriculum, the MCDS seminar, a concentration area and electives. Students must also complete a capstone project in which they work on a research project at CMU or on an industry-sponsored project.
In total, students must complete 144 eligible units of study, including eight 12-unit courses, two 12-unit seminar courses and one 24-unit capstone course. Students must choose at minimum five core courses. The remainder of the 12-unit courses with course numbers 600 or greater can be electives chosen from the SCS course catalog. Any additional non-prerequisite units taken beyond the 144 units are also considered electives.
MCDS students must also pass the undergraduate course 15-513 Introduction to Computer Systems (3 units), typically in the summer before their program commences. The student must pass with a grade of B- or better. Failure to pass the course means that the student takes 15-213 during either the fall or spring semester. Note that in both cases the units do not count toward the 144 eligible units of study.
Some example courses of study are included below.
Example 1: Analytics Track, 16 Months
Fall | Spring | Summer | |
Year 1 | Data Science Seminar Machine Learning Machine Learning for Text Mining Advanced Machine Learning Design and Engineering of Intelligent Information Systems Big Data Analytics | Data Science Seminar Capstone Planning Seminar Machine Learning with Big Data Sets Cloud Computing Information Systems Project Search Engines Multimedia Databases and Data Mining Large Scale Multimedia Analysis | Internship |
| Year 2 | Data Science Analytics Capstone |
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Example 2: Systems Track, 16 Months
Fall | Spring | Summer | |
Year 1 | Computational Data Science Seminar Operating Systems Implementation Database Applications Distributed Systems Cloud Computing Advanced Storage Systems | Computational Data Science Seminar Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming Advanced Cloud Computing Multimedia Databases and Data Mining Advanced Databases | Internship |
Year 2 | Computational Data Science Systems Capstone |
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