Prerequisites for Admission

Students must take the GRE exam and complete the following prerequisite courses or equivalents prior to being admitted to the graduate program. Those with a GRE score of less than 1000 and/or lower than an undergraduate grade point average of 3.0 are discouraged from submitting an application to the program. Students who have previously taken the GMAT exam may submit these scores with advance permission of the Graduate School. If one or more prerequisite courses are lacking, a student may be admitted on a provisional basis, but all prerequisite courses must be completed with a grade of C or better by the end of the first semester of admission to the graduate program and such courses will not count toward the degree requirements.

• COS 220 - Introduction to Computer Science I. Credits: 3
• MAT 126 - Calculus I. Credits: 4
• MAT 232 - Principles of Statistical Inference. Credits: 3

Course Work Requirements for the M.S. Degree

The MSIS program consists of 6 core courses and a minimum of four additional courses from the list of courses approved for the program for a total of 30 credits. If some required courses are duplicative of courses that may have been taken in the student’s undergraduate degree program, those course need not be repeated, and the student will select in consultation with the Graduate Coordinator and the Steering Committee additional approved courses to arrive at the total of 30 credit hours.

In general, the normal expectation is that students taking these courses must be admitted to the MSIS program. Preference in class enrollments is given to formally admitted graduate students. Students not formally admitted to the MSIS program or to a graduate program of the academic unit offering the graduate course may be admitted to the course only if all of the following are met:

1. class enrollment caps have not yet been met;
   
2. the student meets all background and course prerequisites for entry into the course and is specifically approved by the concerned instructor;
   
3. admission is not contrary to accrediting or other academic unit policies (non-matriculated students may take graduate-level business administration classes only if they have submitted a certificate or degree application to the Graduate School).

    

Core Courses Required

• BUA 638 - Model-Based Decision Making Credits: 3

• or BUA 465 Information Systems Development (Note: Take BUA 664 first)

• BUA 661 - Knowledge Management and Decision Support Systems Credits: 3
• BUA 664 - Databases and Data Mining in Industry Credits: 3
• SIE 525 - Information Systems Law Credits: 3
• SIE 550 - Engineering Databases and Information Systems Credits: 3

• SIE 556 - Information Systems Architecture or COS 545 Networking or COS 420 Software Engineering Credits: 3

Approved Courses for the MS in Information Systems Program

Students must take at least four additional courses that are approved by their advisor and the MSIS Steering Committee in order to arrive at the total of 30 credits required. Some elective courses are listed below. Students should NOT assume that any combination of the following courses will be approved by their graduate committee. Students should obtain approval of their full program of study prior to taking the following courses to ensure that they will count towards their degree requirements. Some of these elective graduate courses may require prerequisites in addition to the minimum required for general admission to the MSIS graduate program.

Courses Recommended from the Primary Information System Academic Units

Distance Education Issues

Some of the core courses and some of the other courses listed above are offered by “webcast” through distance education methods. Students taking courses by distance methods must meet access, software and hardware requirements.

To be considered for admission, completed applications must be received 8 weeks prior to the beginning of the term. For additional information contact the Graduate School, IS Coordinator, 5782 Winslow Hall, Room 2, Orono, Maine 04469-5782 or e-mail graduate@maine.edu or visit www.spatial.maine.edu/MSIS.htm.

Graduate Faculty

M. Kate Beard-Tisdale, Ph.D. (Wisconsin, 1988), Professor. Geographic information systems, spatial analysis, digital libraries.

Virginia R. Gibson, Ph.D. (State University of New York at Binghamton, 1986), Associate Professor of Management Information Systems. Information systems for management decision support, business climate.

Kathleen Hornsby, Ph.D. (University of Maine, 1999), Assistant Research Professor of National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. Geographic information systems (GIS), spatio-temporal knowledge representation, GIS user interface design.

Nory B. Jones, Ph.D. (Missouri, 2001), Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems. Knowledge management, collaborative technologies, and diffusion of technological innovations.

Laurence J. Latour, Ph.D. (Stevens Institute of Technology, 1985), Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator. Database systems, software engineering, programming languages and environments, software reusability, software specification techniques, concurrency reliability.

Silvia Nittel, Ph.D. (Zurich, 1994), Assistant Professor. Spatial database management systems, mobile object systems, heterogeneous information systems, high performance architectures.

Harlan J. Onsrud, J.D. (Wisconsin, 1982), Professor. Computer and information systems law, cadastral systems, boundary law, and environmental law.

David M. Steiger, Ph.D. (Oklahoma State, 1993), Associate Professor of Management Information Systems. Knowledge management, data mining, decision support systems.

Natalie M. Steiger, Ph.D. (North Carolina State, 1999), Assistant Professor of Management. Systems analysis and optimization, operations research and production.

Michael F. Worboys, Ph.D. (Birmingham England, 1980), Professor. Geographic information representation and reasoning, uncertainty, spatio-temporal information, human interaction issues.