ESL & Special Courses

D 999 Maintenance of Matriculation
Students who have completed all credits for an advanced degree but still have not completed a master’s thesis, engineer project, doctoral dissertation or other academic requirements, enroll for D 999 unless a leave of absence has been granted by the Dean of the Graduate Academics.
DE 10 Developmental English (Intensive Level)
This course will provide the non-native English-speaking student with a systematic review of English grammar, an introduction to discourse and contextual meaning and perspectives of American cultural interactions. Special attention will be paid to the development of basic writing, reading, speaking and listening skills. Students will learn interpretation and organizational skills, and how to use a dictionary and library. American-English pronunciation with emphasis on word stress, sentence stress and rhythm, rising intonation and rising-falling intonation will be covered.
DE 80 Developmental English (Beginner Level)
This course will provide the non-native English speaking student with a review of standard American English grammar necessary in the development of organization and coherence in speaking, writing, and listening. Students will be introduced to reading comprehension.
DE 81 Developmental English (Intermediate Level)
This course will introduce and review the organization and logic of English rhetoric. It will demonstrate how these principles can be useful not only in writing, but also in reading, listening to lectures and giving oral presentations. There will be practice in oral presentation including discrete pronunciation elements of stress, intonation and rhythm (segmentals and supersegmentals) as well as presentation and discussion skills. Students will review the mechanics of sentence structure and verb tenses and learn to develop coherence within and between paragraphs. Library use will be introduced.
DE 82 Developmental English (Advanced Level)
This course will provide non-native English speaking students with improved reading comprehension and writing skills. Emphasis will be given to paraphrasing, summarizing, outlining, and studying from a text of technical readings. Learn to develop a thesis, research and document an essay, as well as write argumentative-explanatory essays.

Ramp course for Graduate Certificate in Cybersecurity program

This three-credit ramp course is designed for graduate students in disciplines other than computer science who are interested in participating in the Graduate Certificate in Cybersecurity program. Depending on the student’s transcript and background, this course may be recommended to be taken as a prerequisite to the program. The student will get no formal credit from this course.

Course Contents

The course will have three components: math, operating systems and telecommunications. It will be initially taught by three instructors in the related areas. Following are the contents in each area:

  • Math (four 2.5-hour sessions)
  • Elements of set theory; understanding sets, subsets, union, ordered set, partial and absolute ordered sets
  • Basics of modular mathematics
  • Definition of reflexive, asymmetric and transitive relations
  • Basics of functions and operations
  • Binary numbers, operations and arithmetic
  • Truth tables for Boolean functions like AND, OR and EXCLUSIVE OR
  • Prime numbers and their properties
  • Basic Probability Theory
  • Asymptotic notation, complexity classes (especially P, NP, NP-complete)
  • Number Theory: prime number theorem, Euler phi function, computing gcd's, Chinese remainder theorem, quadratic residues
  • Abstract algebra: definition of groups, order of a group and order of a group element, Z_n, Z_n*, Fermat's theorem, primitive elements, rings, polynomial rings, finite fields
  • Linear algebra: matrix inversion, determinants, solving systems of linear equations
  • Operating Systems (four 2.5-hour sessions):
  • General understanding of functions and services provided by OS
  • Simple file protection schemes offered by OS, such as file modes in UNIX, file systems of UNIX and Windows
  • Memory management; allocation of buffer space to applications
  • Consequences of buffer overflow and application core dump
  • OS logs
  • Telecom (four 2.5-hour sessions):
  • Basic knowledge of seven layers of OSI and responsibilities of each layer:
  • The definition and meaning of protocol data units
  • Addressing and routing in IP
  • Address resolution between MAC address and IP address
  • CRC coding
  • Meanings of connectionless and connection- oriented
  • The difference between circuit and packet switching
  • Access control and contention with collision detection
  • LAN protocol architecture
  • Basics of TCP/IP
  • Basics of wireless communications

ESL and Special Courses

Contact: Professor Sophie Hales