This document was created by the CAM mentoring program. For the academic year 26-27 the mentoring program coordinators are Katerina and Emily. Feel free to reach out to either of us with any questions (or to your mentor after they have been assigned)!
Note: there is also a (partially deprecated) CAM Wiki, which we hope to update soon.
If you will be TAing in the Fall you are required to attend the math department's TA training session in person the week before the semester starts (you would have gotten an email about this, probably from Marie). In general, anyone not on a fellowship is TAing (look at your offer letter), but if you are unsure, you can email Phil Rusher to check.
There are two conference rooms in the CAM Space. You can book either of these rooms for any reason with common reasons including: TA office hours, reading groups, and meetings (zoom or in person). To book a room, add the shared Google calendar to your own calendar by visiting this page.
Go to Cornell Student Essentials scroll down and click on "Student Center".
Once you've logged in, click "enroll" under the "Academics" heading and select the appropriate term (Fall 20XX). Add any classes you are interested in to you shopping cart and then proceed to confirm enrollment.
- During your first semester you cannot register until the graduate student open enrollment date. You can find this date by clicking "term information" near the top of the page.
- You are highly encouraged to register for significantly more courses than you intend to take. Register for anything that interests you and then drop to a reasonable number after attending each class once or twice.
- Note sure what to register for? See Course Requirements and Course Recommendations.
There are three sets of course requirements that you need to satisfy:
- CAM course requirements
- Math minor requirements
- Minor requirements for another relevant field (of your choosing)
The Math minor requirements are well documented here, but at a high level you will need to take four PhD level courses in the math department, with two of them taken for a letter grade and passed with at least a B-.
CAM requires you to take at least 8 graded courses satisfying the following:
- One course in computational methods
- Seven additional courses spanning at least three of:
- Mathematical Analysis
- Differential Equations & Dynamical Systems
- Stochastic Methods
- Optimization & Discrete Mathematics
- Algorithms & Complexity
- Algebra & Logic
At least three of the 8 courses must be numbered 6000 or above. These requirements are documented here.
This is the most flexible of the three requirements since you get to choose your own minor. Unfortunately, there does not exist a cohesive list of available minors, nor do all minors have well documented requirements. The only thing that is certain is that if your minor committee member is willing to sign off on it, then it is okay. An easy way to learn more about which minors exist and what their requirements are is to ask older students who have passed their A-exam.
Here is a (very short and non-exhaustive) list of common minors for CAM students. We hope to grow out this list over time.
- Computer Science
- Has well documented requirements
- Requires 4 CS courses
- ORIE
- There are 3 variants of this minor: Applied Prob and Stats, Applied OR, and Mathematical Programming
- We are not currently aware of any documentation of the requirements, but we believe that it requires 3 courses
- Statistics
- Has well documented requirements
- Requires 5 courses
- Computational Science and Engineering
- Flexible requirements (and they are not specified on the minor page)
- This is a very common CAM minor, so you should be able to find an older student that can tell you more about it
We are allowed to "double dip" courses between requirements (as long as your committee members are okay with it). Thanks to this fact, it is sometimes possible to complete all of your requirements having taken only 8 courses, but doing so may require some planning. There is no benefit to doing this other than being done with course requirements sooner, which can be a pro or a con depending on your own preferences.
Different CAM students have drasticaly different opinions on certain courses so it is hard to label courses as "good" or "bad". However, there are courses that CAM students tend to register for. The best way to learn about courses is to ask older students or go to the mentoring program's "Get the scoop on classes" event hosted early in the Fall semester. Also, at the start of each semester we have everyone write which courses they are registered for on a whiteboard in the CAM space—perusing this is another great way to find interesting courses.
Though we strongly encourage you to speak to other students to learn about courses, as a starting point, here is a short, non-exhaustive list (that we hope to grow over time) of common courses for CAM students:
- MATH 6210: Measure Theory & Lebesgue Integration
- MATH 6110: Real Analysis
- CS 4210/Math 4250 (crosslist): Numerical Analysis and Differential Equations
- CS 4220/Math 4260: Numerical Analysis: Linear and Nonlinear Problems
- CS 6210: Matrix Computations
- MATH 6150/6160: PDE I/II (PDE I is not a prereq for PDE II)
- CS 6820: Analysis of Algorithms
- CS 6850: The Structure of Information Networks
- MATH 6230: Differential Games and Optimal Control
- MATH 6710/6720: Probability Theory I/II
- MATH 6730/6740: Mathematical Statistics I/II
- ORIE 6300: Mathematical Programming I
- ORIE 6500: Applied Stochastic Processes
- ORIE 6700: Statistical Principles
- Math 6270: Applied Dynamical Systems
In the future, we plan to add information about graduate fellowships and finding advisors and summer jobs to this document. Until then, you should ask older students for advice on these topics.