The University of Illinois at Springfield was originally a junior- and senior-level university, designed to cap off studies at a two-year college. Many of our programs, including the mathematics undergraduate program, still reflect this focus; we anticipate students coming in with approximately 60 credit hours and earning another 60 hours here toward the B.A. Thus you will see in our B.A. Program Overview 32 hours of core math courses, 15 hours of general electives, and 13 hours of the University's required Engaged Citizenship electives. There are, however, many different transfer situations, and many of you will have somewhat more or less than exactly 60 transfer hours. Some have all entrance requirements and more coming in, and their extra hours will apply to those 15 hours of general electives; while other students may still need to be working on Calculus and general education courses such as Composition and Humanities. We would like you to review the general information below to get started off well, and if necessary for particulars to your situation, refer to your Notice of Admission and discuss with your math advisor.
Disclaimer: This page is informal (not the official catalog), and is directed to math degree-seeking students. Some of it, such as graduation information, does NOT apply to students who are non-degree seeking, or working on secondary math certification with the Teacher Education Program, unless they are also earning a math B.A. If you are in TEP and also believe that you are a math major, but are not listed in the Online Math Coordinator’s (mathonline@uis.edu) student database, verify your status with the TEP coordinator (ttana2@uis.edu), so that our records can be accurate.
With your initial notification, you should have received your UIN, which you will need to log on to UIS systems, including your email. The first time you start searching for courses to take during your first semester, The Registration page will give you some registration tips and links, and direct you to create your NetID and Enterprise ID. You may alternately choose to go straight to Technology Services' NetID page and develop your logon information there.
Begin using your student email as soon as possible, because official information about upcoming registration, billing, events, and other items of interest to students will be sent out on the student distribution lists. Here is a link to some information on email. In the future, you will be able to use a single login to access email, blackboard, student accounts, and all other UIS applications by clicking on the myUIS link at the top left of the uis.edu homepage.
In your first semester here, or as soon as it is offered (since we usually don't have it in the summer), you must sign up for MAT 330, the entrance assessment. It's not really a "writing" course as the title implies (it's math); in fact, it's not a course at all, so it won't add to your overall course load. It is a test which you take and submit once. This is the only math course in the schedule you will sign up for as a credit/no credit option. Everything else you must take for a letter grade. If you have entered the program without having your 3 semesters of calculus prerequisites completed, you should contact the dept. chair or the online coordinator before signing up for MAT 330; we will probably want to have you take this assessment a little later.
For your first semester as an online student, it is advisable to take a smaller course load if you can, to allow yourself to adjust to the demands of studying online. In any given semester, we do not recommend taking more than two core math courses at the same time. Do not sign up for courses for which you have not taken all the prerequisites. Expect registration for Summer and Fall to open in April; for Spring, in November.
Students who were registered for classes in the preceding semester may start registering a week earlier. Don't wait too long—the math courses are popular and will fill up quickly.
Sometimes half the seats in an online course are set aside for online math majors only. The other half are open to all. If you attempt to register for the restricted section, and there are available seats but you can't get in, it may be that you are not listed in the registration system as an online math major.
Do not sign up for courses with a number below 330. Those are service courses, offered as electives for other majors. They are not the core for a math major. Note this one: MAT 302 Discrete Mathematics does NOT count as a math elective for math majors.
Many math classes have prerequisites, and these are not arbitrarily set up-- you will need the topics taught in the earlier classes to succeed in the later ones.
Do not take MAT 432, Mathematical Statistics II, without having completed MAT 431, Mathematical Statistics I. You must have at least two full semesters of Calculus before taking MAT 332, Linear Algebra.
Linear is a key course, and you should take it as early as possible. It must be completed (not taken concurrently) before attempting MAT 403 Abstract Algebra, MAT 404 Geometry, MAT 444 Operations Research Methods, and MAT 336 Differential Equations.
You will need the third semester of Calculus, and Linear, before taking MAT 415 Advanced Calculus. Advanced Calculus must be completed before taking MAT 416 Real Analysis.
You may take MAT 401 History of Math after completing at least one semester of Calculus, and Mathematical Statistics I after completing at least two semesters of Calculus. Be sure to earn at least a C in all prerequisite courses.
You may contact them by phone or email, or visit them at the university. Email is often the best bet, unless you know the particular instructor's office hours. Of course, when you are enrolled in a course, most contact will occur in Blackboard. Outside of that, you may find the math program's contact information at our Faculty page. Although you will have communicated with Admissions and the online coordinator using your personal email address during application, you should start checking your official student email account after acceptance. Expect instructors' contacts and other college correspondence to come through that.
The University bookstore should have lists of all required texts a few weeks before the first day of class.
You'll need to get a graduation contract from Registration’s Forms page. Officially, this must be completed before the 8th week of your final semester; however, the final semester is a little late to be starting on that. You should be double-checking that you have all the necessary courses long before you have registered for your last semester. Contact your faculty advisor (see the next question below if you don't know who that is.)
If you would like to come to Springfield for graduation, let us know early. A few online students do this, and we would like to meet you. If we know early enough how many are coming, maybe we can set aside a time for all of us to get together. There is also usually an online students' graduation brunch the morning of graduation, for those who were in online degree programs across the university.
The online coordinator is an unofficial advisor to assist you through the application process and into your first semester. After that, you should be assigned an official faculty advisor. The graduation contract must be signed between you and a faculty member. Likewise, this FAQ page is also merely an unofficial aid to get you started; you should also be aware of and in compliance with the official version of program entrance and graduation requirements for your particular cohort (the first semester you were accepted as a student, registered for and completed a course), which is accessible in the online catalog.
By your second registered semester, you should know who your faculty advisor is. If you don't, contact the online coordinator to look it up.
A list is published each semester at the general education pages: www.uis.edu/generaleducation/curriculum/courselist . The first sections on this list are courses which are approved for the semester to meet certain General Education requirements, for those of you who were admitted lacking those. At the end of the list are the courses approved for that semester to meet ECCE requirements.
The list has recently been upgraded so that it contains links to course descriptions and schedule, so you can easily click through and find out if there are seats available. Courses offered online also have "online" in parentheses, so you will not need to check each one to find that out.
The current catalog's undergrad page, toward the bottom, explains the ECCE requirement in some detail. Here's a tip: the TOTAL number of hours taken must be at least 13 hours. There are listed several areas which must be covered (Speaker's Series, Global Awareness, U.S. Communities, and Engagement Experience; there is also an Elective classification). Some classes are 3 hours, and some are 4. If you take a 4 hour course, the degree audit system DARS throws the extra hour into electives. If you take three of these 4 hour courses, you should not need an extra ECCE elective at all. If you take two 4 hour courses and one 3 hour course, and need just one more elective hour, you may retake the Speaker Series for it.
All degree-seeking undergraduate students entering Fall 2007 or later must take the 13 hours of ECCE. Any student who was deficient in the lower division gen eds, and must take those, would have been so notified on the bottom of the first page of their Notice of Admission.
Absolutely. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Our Career Services office offers professional counselors, a very extensive job search tool, a Virtual Career Center, and on-campus workshops which you can attend online through use of Elluminate. Select UIS-SUCCESS on their website to establish your profile and receive passwords to access career resources. To properly hone your job search, searching skills, and resume, you should start working with Career Services in your first semester at UIS—don't put it off until the end.
View a feature article and video about the Career Development Center.
If you are accepted into a degree-seeking online program, and take only online courses, you qualify for e-tuition. This is listed on the Registration website as a per-credit-hour amount; remember that the math courses are 4 credit hours each. In addition, there is an online course fee which is also per-credit-hour. This applies if you are in-district, out-of-district, or anywhere in the world. If you are taking only online courses, many of the other fees are waived under the current system.
There is also a flat per-semester services fee listed. (Students who will be taking on-campus courses have additional health insurance, immunization, and other items to be concerned about. Online students should encounter these only if they are near campus and sign up for an on-campus course.) There is a small student-to-student grant which is automatically assessed on every student's bill. If you don't want to participate, you must notify the Bursar (217-206-6738) in advance to waive it.
If you see other fees on your account, it may be simply a mistake. In a few instances, students who do not even come to the campus have been charged for immunization non-compliance, or have had a hold placed on their registration. If you are an online degree-seeking major and this happens to you, contact Health Services and represent to them that you are only online and never come to campus; they can reverse it. They have set up a page for students to view individual immunization requirements and holds; this should only be necessary for students who are on campus.
If you are normally online, but do plan on coming to campus occasionally, you may get a parking hang tag to avoid a parking ticket. There is an online application at the parking webpage. There is also an explanation there of the policy for getting a one-day tag. (section 3-105)
To learn more about majoring in math online, please read our applicants' FAQ.
Updated August 21, 2009
