Guidelines for filling in a Program of Study Plan

The first two parts will be filled in from the information that you gave to the Graduate Studies Chair for these entries in the header part of your milestones page. The other parts are directly editable by you in your Academic Planner.


Program of Study -- Stage 1 Plan

1. Advisor(s) and other advisory committee members
This field will name your primary advisor (or co-advisors) -- i.e. the person (or people) you specified at the AdvisingFest, who should now be listed as your advisor(s) of record on your advising report. (You can see your advising report at http://www.ureg.ohio-state.edu/Indexes/current.html.) If you listed other faculty as a committee to give you advice, they will be listed here, too.

2. Area(s) of specialization
This will be the one-word or short-phrase descriptor of (each of) your primary area(s) of specialization - e.g., "syntax", "historical linguistics and sociophonetics", "computational linguistics and sentence processing".

3. Coursework
Use the table provided to list the courses that you have taken or plan to take in your first years on the program. At this stage, the courses for year 3 will necessarily be only a preliminary list, but the schedule should include the complete list of entry-level courses that you have designated as relevant to preparing yourself to engage in primary research in your area(s) of specialization. Identify these in the table somehow (e.g., by putting an asterisk or a subscript "e" following the course number). Except in exceptional circumstances, these should be courses that you can complete by the end of your second year, and any exceptional circumstances should be explained in a note below the table. Also, if the table of courses does not include all core courses, make a note following the table explaining why. For example, did you "test out" of a core course by submitting the syllabus for a course taken elsewhere, which the faculty responsible for teaching that core course deemed to be equivalent to the OSU course? Or did your advisory committee approve your postponing one of the core courses in order to take a seminar relevant to your specialization that would not be offered again in time?

4. First Qualifying Paper
Give a short, preliminary description of the research that you plan to report on in your First Qualifying Paper. Also describe any program-specific requirements that you and your committee have agreed to regarding its content. For example, should it demonstrate a facility in experimental design? Should it incorporate a large amount of primary data that you elicited from a language consultant or extracted from an online corpus?


Program of Study -- Stage 2 Plan

1. & 2.
Update your plan by making having the Graduate Studies Chair noting any changes you've made in these two fields since your Stage 1 plan.

3. Coursework
Use the table provided to update the list of courses that you have taken or plan to take in your first three years on the program. Append notes explaining any changes in the list of entry-level courses since your Stage 1 Plan, or any exceptional circumstances involving them or the four core courses. At this stage, the schedule also should include the complete list of advanced courses that you have designated as relevant to your program of study. Differentiate each of these from the entry-level courses in the table (e.g., by putting two asterisks or a subscript "a" following the course number).

4. First Qualifying Paper
Specify the title and list the three people who will be the reading committee for the First Qualifying Paper.

5. Second Qualifying Paper
Give a short, preliminary description of the research that you think you might develop to report on in your Second Qualifying Paper. Also describe any program-specific requirements that you and your committee have agreed to regarding its content, and the understanding that you and the two reading committees have made regarding the breadth requirement.

6. Language requirement
Describe how the language requirement will be fulfilled (or how and when it was fulfilled).


Program of Study -- Stage 3 Plan

1. & 2.
Update your plan by making having the Graduate Studies Chair noting that at this stage your advisor(s) of record officially will become the chair(s) of your Advisory Committee, as described in section II.6.4 of the Graduate School Handbook (the section on the "Candidacy Examation"), and that you must have an official "Advisory Committee" of at least four people who will constitute your Candidacy Examination Committee. See section 9 of the department Program Handbook for local rules about who can be on your Advisory Committee.

3. Coursework
Use the following table to update the list of courses that you have taken. Append notes explaining any changes in the list of entry-level or advanced courses since your Stage 2 Plan, or any exceptional circumstances involving them or the core courses.

5. Second Qualifying Paper
Update this section by specify the title and listing the 3 people who were the reading committee.

6. Language requirement
Update this section to specify how and when the language requirement was fulfilled.

7. Dissertation topic and Candidacy Examination
Describe the projected general topic of your dissertation. Describe the specific format of the written part of your Candidacy Examination other than the draft of the dissertation proposal (e.g., "two review articles, one in the primary area and the other in the secondary area"), and list any program-specific requirements regarding the timing. For example, your Advisory Committee might require you to submit a rough first draft of your dissertation proposal to them during the quarter before the Exam is taken, so that this draft can be guide them in choosing the questions that you will address in the rest of the written part. See the department Program Handbook for rules regarding the written portion of every Candidacy Exam in the doctoral program in Linguistics. See section VII.4 of the Graduate School Handbook for rules that are general to all doctoral programs at Ohio State University.