Texas ECE offers an MSE degree in 8 different academic tracks, but students can also take advantage of the immense variety of resources for interdisciplinary work at The University of Texas at Austin. Most graduate students have the opportunity to participate in state-of-the-art research along with faculty researchers. Students who are admitted to pursue a MSE will typically require four long semesters to complete the program. A Student within the MSE program may subsequently apply to the PhD program, but there is no guarantee of acceptance.<br>The Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering currently offers three Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) programs to meet differing needs: the Traditional MSE program, the Integrated BSECE/MSE program, and the single-track Alternatively Scheduled MSE program with a concentration in Software Engineering. The latter program is offered through Texas Engineering Executive Education (TxEEE). The Traditional and Integrated BSECE/MSE programs share the same academic track advisors, the Alternatively Scheduled MSE program has its own program advisor. Students in each of these MSE programs are expected to meet the same academic standards.<br>Computer architecture is at the interface of computer hardware and software. Its practitioners are responsible for specifying, designing, and implementing at the architecture level the hardware structures that carry out the work specified by computer software. Computer architects share the responsibility for providing mechanisms that algorithms, compilers, and operating systems can use to enhance the performance and/or energy requirements of running applications. Computer architecture spans many dimensions, such as the scope of a processor (embedded processors, desktop systems, servers, and supercomputers), the target application (general-purpose versus domain-specific), the characteristics of the design objectives (speed, power consumption, cost, reliability, availability, and reconfigurability), and the measurement and analysis of resulting designs.