Up to two advisor-approved upper-division undergraduate courses (6 to 8 credit hours total) may be counted toward the ECE master’s degree. This is a more strict requirement than the three upper-division undergraduate courses as stated in the Graduate Catalog: https://registrar.utexas.edu/catalogs. ECE undergraduate majors have enrollment priority in ECE undergraduate courses due to their need to take certain courses to fulfill BSEE degree requirements. The ECE Advising Office, in consultation with the ECE Curriculum Committee, determines when to open a limited number of ECE undergraduate courses to graduate students and notifies ECE graduate students by email. ECE undergraduate courses may be unavailable to graduate students during early registration. Sometimes ECE undergraduate courses are opened to graduate students as late as the start of the semester in which the courses are offered.
Note that a bar for unfulfilled prerequisites that prevents an undergraduate student, and never a graduate student, from enrolling in an ECE undergraduate course must be waived manually for a graduate student by an ECE Advising Office staff member.
Open seats in an ECE undergraduate course are not a guarantee that a course will be made available to graduate students. Despite advisor approval or an instructor’s approval, an ECE undergraduate course may remain closed to graduate students. Students are advised to list more than the number of courses they need to take in a given semester on their registration form in order to obtain approval in advance and to be well prepared for registration.
Graduate students are advised to discuss their preparedness to take an ECE undergraduate course with the instructor. Although graduate students are not subject to fulfillment of the prerequisites of an ECE undergraduate course, ECE undergraduate courses can be challenging. Some ECE undergraduate courses are 4 credit hours, and not 3 credit hours, due to the heavier workload. Note that students are charged tuition for the additional credit hour. Graduate students taking a 4-hour undergraduate course and Research Problems, for example, could reduce their Research Problems course hours so as not to exceed full-time enrollment for 9 hours.