Frequently Asked Questions

Consult the general undergraduate FAQ website (http://www.cs.queensu.ca/students/undergraduate/faq/) for general inquiries not specific to COGS.

1) Undergraduate Summer Research

Check out the Undergraduate Research and Research Fellowship websites for detailed information. For USRA, contact the professor you like to work with and apply for NSERC's Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA). See the NSERC website for how to apply for the funding. USRA award recipients are expected to work full time (35 hours per week) for 16 consecutive weeks. Effective October 1, 2016, the Ontario minimum wage is $11.40 per hour which comes to around $6300 for the summer term. Look at the undergraduate website for other relevant information.

2) COGS Course Planning

COGS is a highly multi-disciplinary program. You have to plan your courses carefully to complete your degree in 4 years. Poor planning may lead to situations where you don't have necessary prerequisites to enrol into a required course or finding that a course that you had planned to take in the following year is not being offered in that year. Please consult the detailed program information to check the courses and their prerequisites.

3) Enrolment

If you cannot enrol into a course, check if you meet all the prerequisites. Courses offered by departments other than School of Computing may have a cut-off date before which only students of that department get the priority to enrol. Then these courses are opened for all. Wait and try to get enrolled as soon as it opens for all. This is a university policy and we cannot help you with the enrolment before this cut-off date. In other special cases, get permission from the instructor and send a request to the undergraduate assistant (to help you with enrolling into a course). More information for specific years can be found at the enrollment news website.

4) Transfer

To transfer into the COGS program through an automatic acceptance into a Computing degree plan from another program at Queen's, you need to have a minimum of B in CISC 121 and for the pending list, a C. You also need a cumulative GPA of 1.9 or higher. The transfer can only happen in May each year. So, if you really interested to study COGS but do not currently meet the transfer requirements, you can still enroll in CISC and COGS classes and hope to get a better grade in the required courses (take the CISC 121 course again or take CISC 124) to apply for the transfer in the following year. Only 4th year capstone courses currently require being in a Computing plan.

5) Requirements for enrolling into COGS499

To enroll into the final year honors project (COGS499) which is needed to graduate in Computing with a specialization in COGS, one needs to have an overall GPA of 1.90 and a GPA of 2.6 from 30.0 units in CISC and a GPA of 2.60 in COGS. Please check your transcripts to compute where you stand in terms of the requirements and contact COGS coordinator with your transcript and your GPAs (overall, CISC, COGS) if you have any questions regarding enrollment problem.