By Zishan Khan

Contributor

I am pursuing my Master’s Degree from the Department of Computer Science at CSUSM. I was admitted to the Master’s program during fall 2013.

I was admitted as a conditional student and was required to take GRE and get a 3.5 on analytical writing, or get a research topic from a professor and submit a GWAR paper. As there is no system in the CSUSM Computer Science Department to get an academic adviser, I did leg work to approach each and every professor to become my academic adviser over the course of my studies from fall 2013 until spring 2015. But I heard only one answer from each professor: that they are busy with other students.

There are hardly 20 students in my Master’s program, but still the professors are busy. Due to this, I was unable to get an adviser and still I am without an academic adviser, and so I was unable to submit my GWAR paper. Because of all of this, I am now academically disqualified from the program.

First of all, because GWAR is important for this school, the administration should plan ahead of time and provide a credit class for the GWAR requirement so that a student can enroll in the class and will not face severe consequences such as I am facing now.

Secondly, there should be a system which automatically assigns an academic adviser to Master’s students who can guide them to complete all of the requirements on time and make it possible to complete their degree in the given constraint of time.

Thirdly, as per classes are concerned, the school should make use of their computer science faculty and students to create all of the school’s software technology, like Cougar Courses, web check outs, etc. This could help the school to secure funds for the development of the Computer Science Department and would indeed be beneficial for students. This experience would also help computer science students find jobs once they complete their degrees.

Finally, there is a serious need of an international department which takes care of CPT and OPT for international students. I feel this is a need because according to the current procedure, you are supposed to know two months in advance before getting a job to enroll into the CPT class. But it is completely unfair for international students to land an internship because as an international student, you can only work on your CPT during the course of the program and on OPT after completion.

These are my recommendations which I believe will make CSUSM’s graduate program work as it is supposed to, and will attract more students and will help current students in CSUSM on conditional admission to not get disqualified from their program.