Admission to Candidacy & Time Limits

Admission to candidacy requires maintaining a GPA of at least 3.0 for all graduate coursework and is granted upon satisfactory completion of all required coursework, preliminary examinations, and the defense of the dissertation proposal.

Student must complete all the requirements for candidacy within five years of full-time study after receiving the master's degree. Once students attain candidacy, they have four years to complete the PhD. Thus, in the normal situation, students will have a maximum of nine (9) years to complete all of the requirements for receiving the Ph.D. degree.