Graduate Student Association's Orientation, Advancement to Candidacy and Transferring Credit

I attended the Graduate Student Association's (GSA) Orientation today. A nice thing I learnt was that there's full remission of in-state education of registration fees and health care premiums if a student works at least 10 hours a week as a GSI/TA, Reader or Tutor (a 25% appointment or higher).

Tax filing is important too. GSA will hire a tax consultant for a workshop here later.

Setting Up Payment Account

There are two places you need to set up for receiving all your payments:

• Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) in MyUCSC for getting financial aid from Student Business Service, if you don't set this you will get your financial aid through checks.
• Payroll setup at your department for getting your payment from work as TA/GSR (I don't know how to do this yet).

Advance to Candidacy within Two Years?

At the BBQ I met a nice second year PhD student working on software engineering (Mr. Z). He planned to advance to candidacy at the end of this year (so two years in total).

According to Graduate Requirements, in order to advance to candidacy you must "have completed the course requirements, passed both the preliminary and qualifying examinations (or just the qualifying examination if passed prior to the end of the student's third year in the program), cleared all Incompletes from their records, have an appointed Dissertation Reading Committee and have paid the filing fee. "
Mr. Z said it's normally OK if you take two 5-credit courses each quarter so that you can finish all course requirements and advance to candidacy within two years. But you do have to work hard to make sure you find the topic for your dissertation (needed for qualifying examinations). Publishing papers is not a hard requirement. He said some other guys he talked two only advanced to candidacy at their fourth year!

Transferring Credits

We also talked about transferring credits from other Master programs. According to Graduate Requirements, you can transfer up to three courses from other institutions. But Mr. Z said normally it's hard because you have to submit your previous exam papers, term assignments as part of the partition. And you can only do that after the first quarter (so if you want to transfer CMPS 201 don't take it in the first year's first semester, you can take it at the second year's first semester).

I'm thinking of transferring some of my old courses, but it seems I can't find my old assignment works. :(