<p>Let's say you got into the electrical engineering grad program of a certain school, is it possible to change to CS?</p>
<p>Yes, you would just apply to the CS department and see if they take you. Before you apply, you should go over to the CS department and introduce yourself to the grad director and talk about your plans. Good luck!</p>
<p>It is not the same as changing majors in an undergraduate program. Since it is likely that Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are in different department and possibly even different colleges, you will need to submit a full application to the new department. There is no guarantee that they will admit you.</p>
<p>I presume that you are talking about a Masters degree. For a Ph.D. it is less important to change departments since you can probably find a research advisor who is doing the research that you are interested in in your department or find an advisor in the CS department who can take you on.</p>
<p>I would venture to say that if you aren’t sure which one you want to do, you aren’t yet ready to go to grad school - you should take some more time to do research and make a firm decision. Switching programs in grad school is possible but difficult, and in an MS program by the time you want to switch you might be nearly finished.</p>
<p>Sometimes you don’t have to completely apply separately. If you’ve already been enrolled you may just need a certain number of signatures from each department in order to transfer you. That’s what I did after deciding to work with a professor in aerospace engineering instead of mechanical engineering.</p>
<p>@boneh3ad - Were you actually completely changing programs though, or were you just trying to use a different professor as your advisor? I agree that you don’t always have to apply separately - and even if you do, sometimes it’s just a formality. But I also don’t want OP to think it’s as simple as changing your undergraduate major - at some places it actually might be, if EE and CS are in the same school or department and share a lot of required courses. At other places it might not.</p>
<p>I was completely changing programs. I was admitted to mechanical engineering and I switched over to aerospace engineering. Like I said, I had to have the signature of the department heads of both departments and there was a professor over in aerospace who was willing to take me on already, so it wasn’t like I could just do it at a whim, but it did not require me to submit a separate application to aerospace engineering.</p>
<p>Nice! So there’s a variety of kinds - some programs will just let you transfer laterally without an application as long as you have a professor at bat for you.</p>
<p>I suspect that most programs will let you do that as long as you have the right professor at bat for you. I can’t be certain about how much it helped, but it certainly didn’t hurt that the professor trying to hire me was a “university distinguished professor” who was an NAE fellow. It certainly didn’t hurt.</p>
<p>And some universities allow students to work with professors in other departments as their advisor.</p>