College of Engineering / Electrical and Computer Engineering / People / skm0049 / Prospective Students

Prospective Students

All prospective students must correspond via the following email address, and all messages to other email inboxes will be ignored: millican+students@auburn.edu

Expected graduate student conduct

All graduate students (MS and PhD) are expected to conduct their education and research according to the following principles.

1. Independence & Effort: Students are not employees of the advisor, nor is the advisor the boss/supervisor of students. Students will not be micromanaged and are expected to learn how to perform tasks through literature, experimentation, and by asking critical questions. Students will not rely on others for information which they can obtain themselves. Graduate-level students must spend effort on tasks beyond what’s assigned to them, in the classroom and elsewhere. Students are expected to 1) scrutinize their own experiments, results, and ideas, 2) review their own documents, 3) debug their own experiments, and 4) to create documentation and notes of their own.
2. Responsibility: Students are solely responsible for their progress in their graduate plan of study. Students will seek publication outlets, address deadlines, and navigate bureaucracy. Students are responsible for simultaneously addressing their classroom, research, assistantship, and personal obligations.
3. Honesty: Without honest self-assessment, progress is impossible. Not reaching goals is acceptable when lessons are learned, but masking failure behind conjecture and projection is bound for further failure. Students are not expected to be omniscient, but students are expected to be honest in their abilities, their knowledge, and their performance. The first plagiarism performed by a student will result in immediate referral to the Provost’s office for expulsion from Auburn University and the immediate withdrawal of advisor support.
4. Professionalism: Students are expected to produce high-quality research which can be reproduced by others, which in turn requires procedures to be documented and experiments (software code, hardware, etc.) to be distributable. Students must take detailed notes of their daily thoughts, actions, and interactions. Students must also communicate in an unambiguous, concise, and professional manner to all within and outside the University.
5. Advisor-student interaction: An advisor a valuable resource which provides direction, not a supervisor which assigns tasks. Advice is never given haphazardly or maliciously and thus must never be ignored: instead, advice must be either directly implemented or indirectly addressed. Additionally, the time of both advisor and student is valuable: due diligence must be taken to independently address issues before seeking advice.

Graduation requirements

Beyond the requirements listed by the University and the Department, the following requirements must be met before graduating. For all published papers, “being the first author” requires writing the majority of text in a manuscript and making the final edits of the manuscript. Original articles do not include articles with minimal additional contributions or no unique contributions (e.g., surveys and embedded tutorials). Students are responsible for submitting their own manuscripts.

1. (MS) At least one original paper must be published in a reputable conference proceedings where the student is the first author.
2. (MS) A thesis of at least 40 pages which 1) describes the problem researched to a broad electrical & computer engineering audience, 2) adequately educates the audience on necessary background and motivation, 3) rationally describes methods employed to resolve the described problem, 4) adequately describes experiments performed and soundly analyzes results, and 5) presents the material in a professional manner indicating effort and due diligence.
3. (PhD) At least three original papers must be published in a reputable conference proceedings where the student is the first author.
4. (PhD) At least one survey paper must be published in a reputable conference proceedings or journal where the student is the first author.
5. (PhD) At least one original journal paper must be published in a reputable journal where the student is the first author.
6. (PhD) A thesis of at least 100 pages which 1) describes the problem researched to a broad electrical & computer engineering audience, 2) adequately educates the audience on necessary background and motivation, 3) rationally describes methods employed to resolve the described problem, 4) adequately describes experiments performed and soundly analyzes results, and 5) presents the material in a professional manner indicating effort and due diligence.

Application – Step 1: Applicants

All students (MS and PhD) applying to Dr. Millican's research program must demonstrate the following skills, abilities, and professional practices. These indicators must be demonstrated in the application material, otherwise no follow-up interview will be scheduled.

1. Knowledge and ability of computer programming, algorithms, and data structures.
2. An understanding of the purpose of graduate school and the requirements of completing a graduate-level degree, including knowledge of Dr. Millican's research.
3. The ability to communicate professionally, succinctly, and precisely, and the ability to adjust vocabulary and context based on target audiences. Citing any articles published in "predatory journals/conferences" will result in a rejected application without further review.

Applicants can submit documents of their choosing which demonstrates the above, including CVs, published papers, letters, and proposals. Questions to Dr. Millican regarding his research are encouraged before submitting application material.

Application – Step 2: Interviews

Applicants who demonstrate the above in their submitted material will be asked for a 30-minute interview via Skype. The purpose of this interview is to confirm the above abilities and to evaluate character through verbal communication.

Application – Step 3: Application to the Department of Electrical Engineering

All applicants must submit their application to the Department of Electrical Engineering before any funding offer is made.

Application – Step 4: Graduate student research assistant (GRA) offers

All applicants will be evaluated and GRA offers will be made based on merit and stipends available. Offers will be made on a per-semester basis, and stipend values are based on the Department's GTA stipends and are non-negotiable. Beyond the first semester, students may be supported through graduate teaching assistant (GTA) stipends.

Graduation completion

Students are expected to progress towards their graduation requirements by completing the above milestones in a timely manner. The rate at which the student completes their graduation requirements is determined solely be the student’s effort. The bellow indicators will be interpreted as progress, and such indicators must be indicated at every interaction between the advisor and the student.

1. The student describing new sources found, the concepts/techniques/ideas learned from these sources, and how these sources will be used complete one’s graduate program.
2. The student describing new analytical ideas created by the student which will be experimented on.
3. The student describing new experiments to be performed, how these experiments will be created, and how these experiments will be analyzed and interpreted.
4. Demonstrations of (partially completed) experiments. Although experiments take time to create, progress towards a completed experiment must be demonstrated.
5. The results of experiments and sound analysis of results. Experiments need not be “successful”, but future directions must be proposed based on unexpected results.
6. New drafts of manuscripts. The student is solely responsible for making thorough edits of their own drafts, but feedback on structure, organization, and content will be given.
7. Thorough edits of drafts of manuscripts. The advisor will make detailed edits of near-final drafts until systematic errors become apparent.

A student’s rate of progress will be interpreted by the advisor. Systematic lack of progress towards graduation requirements will first be informed to the student. If systematic lack of progress of the same nature is not addressed and the advice of the advisor is not acted upon, the advisor will withdraw support.