This page is intended to provide some details on how things related to graduate students operate at various levels of the University. It is not strictly necessary for a student to know all of the information on this page, but the information here can potentially be helpful in navigating your graduate career.
Organizational Units
Cornell University is split into a large number of interlocking organizational units and leadership teams. The University provides organizational charts here: https://dbp.cornell.edu/university-org-structure/. Here, we will only consider the organizational units most relevant to graduate students in the Sibley School, which are the Colleges, the Graduate School, Graduate Fields, and Departments.
Colleges and the Graduate School
Depending on how you count, Cornell is composed of 9 undergraduate colleges/schools and 9 graduate and professional colleges/schools (see here for a full list: https://www.cornell.edu/academics/colleges.cfm). Each college/school is led by a dean and is the admitting entity for all students in that college/school. The Cornell Graduate School is one of the 9 graduate/professional colleges/schools. This handbook focuses only on the Graduate School, and not the other 8 professional/graduate organizations. All graduate students (working towards a PhD or research masters degree) at Cornell are admitted to the Graduate School, so even though graduate students work with faculty whose home departments are in a variety of different colleges/schools, all graduate students are members of the same organizational unit. The Graduate School is governed by the graduate school code of legislation: https://gradschool.cornell.edu/policies/code-of-legislation/. All matters related to PhD and MS students are ultimately the purview of the graduate school.
Departments
Academic Departments are the organizational units at the level below colleges/schools, and are typically organized about a well-defined academic discipline. A full list of academic departments is available here: https://www.cornell.edu/academics/departments.cfm. Academic departments are the main organizational units for undergraduates, who affiliate with an academic department (usually after general admission to a college/school). Departments are also the organizational unit for faculty hiring. Faculty tenure lines (that is, tenure-track and tenured positions) lie within a department. When a tenure-track faculty member is tenured, their tenure is specific to their department. Departments are led by department directors (or chairs), who are members of the department faculty. Many departments also have department managers (these are typically staff positions).
Graduate Fields
The Graduate School’s organizational units are known as graduate fields, and can be thought of as analogous to departments for graduate students. Graduate admissions are by graduate field, and all graduate students specify their intended graduate field in their applications. A full list of graduate fields is available here: https://gradschool.cornell.edu/admissions/degrees-fields/cugradfos/. Some fields are closely associated with an academic department, some fields have no specific department association (for example, the Center for Applied Mathematics), and some academic departments are associated with multiple graduate fields, as is the case with the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (otherwise known as the MAE department). Note the use of ‘associated’. Departments do not own or control graduate fields – these are separate organizational units, with their own rules and leadership. Fields are governed by their own particular field rules. Fields are lead by a Director of Graduate Studies (DGS; faculty who are members of the field) and administered by a Graduate Field Administrator (GFA; staff). Fields frequently have larger faculty memberships than the departments they are associated with, because any professor at Cornell can join any field – all that is required is a vote by the field’s current membership. Field membership is required to serve as a committee chair for students who matriculate into that field. This allows faculty at Cornell to assemble research groups with students drawn from multiple different academic disciplines without needing to have joint departmental appointments (which is also an option for Cornell faculty). Field membership is also not automatic. For example, not all department members of MAE are necessarily members of all 3 of the graduate fields associated with MAE.
Subjects and Concentrations
Every graduate field has one or more Subjects (a full list of Fields and Subjects is available here: https://gradschool.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CU_GradSchool_FieldsOfStudy2024.pdf). Most fields have only one subject and so the distinction between Field and Subject is not frequently made and is often not well understood throughout the University. This handbook covers the fields of Mechanical Engineering (ME), Aerospace Engineering (AE) and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (TAM). Each of these three fields has a subject with the same name as the field. In addition, both Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering have a second subject (as of 2024) called Robotics. The Robotics program is implemented as a Subject distributed amongst four different fields (AE, ME, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering).
Each Subject is partitioned into Concentrations. For example, the Mechanical Engineering subject has 7 concentrations: biomedical mechanics, dynamics and control, energy and sustainability, fluid dynamics, micro- and nanoscale engineering, solid mechanics and materials, and thermal science. The Aerospace Engineering subject also has 7 (partially overlapping) concentrations, while Theoretical and Applied Mechanics has four. The Robotics subject only has one concentration (also called Robotics) in all four of the fields where it appears.
A graduate student’s special committee is composed of members representing major and minor subjects. A Minor Field is a Field that offers no admission and no degrees, it serves only to provide minor Subjects. Faculty can represent those field as minor subject members, but not as Special Committee Chairs (see: Selecting Your Advisor and Special Committee). The only minor Field that is likely relevant to the MAE Fields is Computational Science and Engineering.
The Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
The majority of ME/AE/TAM field members are faculty in the Sibley School (otherwise known as the MAE department). The department includes a number of administrative positions filled by a combination of faculty and staff that are relevant to graduate students. These are shown in the (partial) organizational chart, below:
Blocks shaded blue represent faculty positions (typically on 3-5 year terms). Blocks shaded gray are staff positions. As the department is associated with three graduate fields, three different faculty members serve as DGSs, however, only one staff member serves in the GFA position for all 3 fields (the person holding this position has the internal title of Assistant Director for Graduate Affairs). A support staff person (the graduate admissions coordinator) assists with admissions and other graduate program office tasks. In addition, one of the three DGSs is also appointed (by the department chair) as the Associate Director of Graduate Affairs (ADGA). This is a department-level position, responsible for everything having to do with PhD and MS students associated with the department. The DGSs of the other two fields delegate some of their duties (most notably admissions and Q exam administration) to the ADGA. The undergraduate program is similarly staffed, with a faculty Associate Director of Undergraduate Affairs (ADUA) supported by multiple staff, who are led by the Assistant Director for Undergraduate Affairs.
TA Appointments
The College of engineering sets a yearly number of graduate TA lines for the department. These are then allocated to various courses across the fall and spring semesters by the ADUA, in consultation with the ADGA and course instructors (the ADUA also sets the course schedule and course offerings for each academic year). The ADGA then assigns the available graduate TA slots to specific graduate students, in consultation with their advisors.
Measurement of Time
The university recognizes three different ‘years’:
- The calendar year (CY) – the conventional Gregorian calendar year lasting from January 1st to December 31st
- The academic year (AY) – the 9 months consisting of the Fall and Spring academic semesters (end of August through end of May)
- The fiscal year (FY) – the 12 month period used for accounting purposes, (July – June)
The university’s fiscal year differs from the US federal fiscal year, which runs from October 1 – September 30. It is highly unlikely that any of this information will ever be useful in any context, but the more you know, right?