Section 2: Registration and Enrollment Basics

2.2 Registration Pre-requisites and Special Permissions

Students may make adjustments to their schedules electronically through the first Friday of the term. Note that some schedule adjustments (i.e., dropping credit hours) will require the addition of other courses in order to maintain the credit hour totals required for fulltime enrollment and funding. A best practice is to register for 15 or more credits total so that if you run into trouble and must drop courses past the course add deadline, you will not be in danger of dropping below the credit hour minima for your fellowship, GRA, etc.

Students attempting to add a course may receive error messages regarding pre-requisites. Sometimes a class is full; sometimes there is a slight time overlap between courses; sometimes the course is open only to majors. Whatever the reason, cases like this will results in error messages. In such cases, a student should do the following: 1) contact the instructor teaching the course; 2) obtain email approval from the instructor to add the desired course (“OK to add without pre-reqs” or “OK to add over the seat limit”); and 3) submit the email to the Graduate School or senitko.1@osu.edu in the BME Graduate Studies Office in accordance with the posted deadlines.

All of the following information must be included, with written instructor permission for any add request, and must be sent from a student’s official osu.edu email account:

course title and number
section call number – most important
instructor
credit hours

FERPA – protect your rights. Use your official buckeyemail.OSU.EDU account

All requests made of Ohio State offices – should be made from the student’s buckeyemail.osu.edu account to help us ensure that your FERPA rights are being protected. Students should not email university offices from their gmail or other accounts. In the rare case that this must happen, it is important that a student include their NAME.# @buckeyemail.osu.edu address in the body of the message.

2.6 Defining and Planning the Distribution of BME Research Credits

The number of research credits (BME 8999) that can be taken after Candidacy is usually limited to 3 credit-hours each semester. Students will want to plan ahead and maximize the number of BME research credits taken before Candidacy, to avoid being forced to take extra time to fulfill total program credit requirements. Note that all credits taken above 8 in a given semester are the same cost. Also, all research credits should be taken under a BME course section unless the primary research advisor’s appointment is in another engineering department. If the latter is true, then at least ½ of the research credits must be taken in BME.

A handy rule of thumb for scheduling research credits is to allow for 3 outside hours of work weekly for each single credit scheduled. That means if you take 4 BME research credits, you may be putting in roughly 12 hours of effort per week on research. However, expectations shared between research advisor and student are most important and take precedence over this equation. Some advisors may wish their students to take as many research credits as possible in the first few semesters; this is OK as long as both advisor and student have a clear understanding of the student’s required course load and obligation to maintain a strong GPA.

After candidacy, when PhD students are expected to take only 3 credits per semester, the time spent on dissertation research-related work actually will be much greater than 9 hours per week. For this reason, it is helpful to think of research hours and expectations of effort as a multi-year combination of “best practices” and a “work ethic” agreed upon by faculty and student. The whole of a student’s efforts will combine over all of the semesters enrolled to amount to at least 45 credits of research-related progress. For most, research goals naturally will take priority over credits and will be the guiding principal. PhD students will have a chance to get and give feedback on progress and expectations by completing a required annual review with their research advisors.

RESEARCH CREDITS, GRA DUTIES & RESEARCH GOALS: SEPARATE BUT RELATED

The academic efforts of a graduate student described above may or may not overlap with the responsibilities and duties of a Graduate Research Associateship (GRA) appointment. The requirements of a GRA appointment are contingent on satisfactory performance of a student’s degree- related pursuits. However, GRA responsibilities may or may not be related to the student’s thesis or dissertation. (This often is why one student’s perceived commitments or time spent in the lab may look different than another’s.) For a GRA appointment, the student receives tuition coverage and a stipend, and is required to do 20 hours per week of activities and tasks related to the appointment. The student develops technical skills and other professional skills holding this associateship.

The student’s performance in a GRA role is evaluated annually by the research supervisor in a separate HR-initiated review. For more information on GRA and GTA appointments, see sections 9 and 11, GSH.