Registration, Courses, and Advising

To ensure that our students in all programs are completing courses in the best sequence for their degree program, students will be pre-registered by the Office of Academic & Advising Services at Heinz College for their first semester of courses. The Office of Academic & Advising Services will begin to register students in the month prior to their start date. This schedule is not absolute. You may see a 36 unit course on your schedule for a brief period of time to indicate that you will be a full time student at Heinz College. This 36 unit course is only a placeholder that the Office of Academic & Advising Services will use until your core/required courses have been assigned. However, you may or may not see actual courses added to your online schedule prior to Heinz College Orientation week.

To ensure that the pre-registration process runs smoothly, do not make any changes to your schedule through the online registration system (SIO). Please do not attempt to add or drop any courses (or sections/times of courses) as the pre-registration process is on-going. In an attempt to make changes, you may lose your seat in a required course and will slow down the registration process for all incoming students.

Students are not pre-registered at the same time. Please do not worry if another incoming student has a full schedule and you do not see courses in your schedule. Pre-registration is an ongoing process that takes time. Pre-registration is considered complete around 2-3 weeks prior to the start of classes. The Office of Academic & Advising Services may make changes to your schedule up until this point. Depending upon your degree program (and results of the placement exams), you may have room in your schedule to add elective courses after the pre-registration process has been completed. For students who wish to secure a part-time job, or settle daycare arrangements, etc, you should anticipate that your first semester schedule will be finalized by the end of Heinz Orientation Week. You will be able to access your schedule through Student information Online: SIO.

Please do not make any changes to your schedule prior to meeting with your Heinz academic advisor. Depending on your unique situation, students may have the flexibility to add additional courses to their first semester schedule. Students will be notified by email when they are scheduled to meet with their academic advisor to discuss finalizing their first semester schedule.

Full-time Heinz students will have the opportunity to take placement exams, which offer you the opportunity to place into a higher section of a course or fully exempt a required course. Click here for details: Placement Exam Information

This pre-registration information does not apply to:

1. Exchange Students - review your registration process here: International Exchange Student Page
2. CMU and Chatham AMP Students - Work with both advisors to finalize your course schedule prior to August.

Carnegie Mellon measures coursework in terms of "units" rather the "credits. A full semester long course is typically 12 units (which is equivalent to 3 - 4 credits of graduate work at other universities), and implies that you can expect to devote an average of 12 hours per week to the course. We also offer half-semester long classes, termed a "mini" that is typically worth 6 units. You can still expect to devote an average of 12 hours per week to these courses. A normal course load varies by degree program but is typically around 60 units. Please visit your program's curriculum page for additional details.

You will have a session with your Program Director, and a meeting with your Academic Advisor. These sessions are meant to clarify course requirements and expectations.

To view your program's curriculum, please visit one of the following sites:

• MISM 16-Month
• MISM 12-Month
• MISM-BIDA and MISM-BIDA 12-Month
• MSISPM
• MSPPM
• MAM
• MEIM
• MSHCA

• Heinz College Full Course Catalog with course descriptions (Please NOTE: You will be pre-registered for your first semester.)
• Current Student Resource Page

In the past, students have expressed an interest in purchasing textbooks prior to their arrival at Carnegie Mellon. We do not recommend that you do this for a number of reasons. First, faculty can change the edition of the textbook they use at the last minute requiring you to purchase a new book once you arrive. Second, we sometimes have different faculty members teaching different sections of the same course. They do not always use the same text.

We've factored the purchase of books into the “Estimated Cost of Attendance” for each degree program offered by the Heinz College. As you will see from the breakdown of expenses, the cost for books is in addition to tuition fees and other expenses. We advise that you use these numbers when planning your expenses.

Programming R for Analytics is a core course that is taken in the fall semester that requires pre-requisite knowledge in statistics. Prior to the start of the fall semester, students should feel comfortable answering the questions below:

• What is a hypothesis test? Why do we perform one?
• What is a confidence interval? Why do we construct them?
• What do the coefficients in a linear regression model mean?

The professor will provide a refresher of these concepts in class, but it’s strongly recommended you review these topics over the summer. You may review these concepts using this free online book: https://leanpub.com/openintro-statistics

If you have any questions, please contact the Senior Director of the School of Public Policy and Management, Alex Lutz - alutz@cmu.edu