Master
of Science in
Family, Youth and Community Sciences
As a graduate student in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences you are responsible for meeting all requirements of the Department, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the Graduate School of the University of Florida. This site will help you make sure that you do so. However, this site does not necessarily include every step that you must take to graduate from the University. You should regularly consult the "Important Links" listed on our home page. These include links to the Graduate School and the College, the graduate catalog with its lists of deadline dates, the University's Graduate Student Handbook and other web sites that have information that is critical to your success as a graduate student.
Getting Started
If
you have not selected a chair for your Supervisory Committee (also
referred to as advisor) when you start your program of study, the Graduate
Coordinator will assign a temporary advisor for you. This individual will
help you during your first semester of graduate study. This faculty member
will help make sure that the courses you take during your first semester
will apply toward your degree, suggest faculty members who may be
appropriate to chair your Supervisory Committee, and help make sure that
you have access to all of the resources available to graduate students in
the Department.
Degree Requirements
The M.S. degree requires a minimum
of 30 graduate credits.
|
Required
Courses |
Credits 3 |
|
Supporting
Courses |
Credits |
| Minimum Credits to Graduate |
30
|
Required Courses
FYC 6230 Theories of Family and
Youth OR FYC 6330 Theories of Community Development.
These are foundation courses. Take them as early as possible in your
program of study. All graduate students must complete one of these
courses. You make take both courses, in which case one will serve as an
elective.
FYC 6971 Research for Master’s
Thesis. You may take as
few as thre or as many as six credit hours of master’s thesis research.
Use these hours to complete your data collection and analysis. You should not
enroll in FYC 6971 before your Supervisory Committee has approved your
thesis research proposal. You need the consent of the chair of your
Supervisory Committee to enroll in FYC 6971.
FYC 6933 Seminar in Family,
Youth and Community Sciences.
Enroll in this course twice during your course of study. The
course is offered only in fall semester.
STA 6126 Statistical Methods in
Social Research I OR other graduate statistics course.
You should complete this requirement as early as possible in your program
of study. You will probably need this course to design and implement your
thesis project. Many students select Statistical Methods in Social
Research I (STA 6126). This is an introductory graduate course in
statistics. If you have taken two or more statistics courses as an
undergraduate, this course will be too basic. There are many other
options. Select the appropriate graduate statistics course in consultation
with your Supervisory Committee.
The Supervisory Committee
You must establish a Supervisory
Committee by the end of the semester in which you complete nine (9) hours
of study (usually the first semester in the program) or by the end of the
second semester, whichever occurs first. Failure to
establish the Committee may result in a hold on your records. Supervisory
Committee serves as mentors for you during your graduate career. Your
Supervisory Committee must approve your program of study, approve your
thesis project, and conduct the final examination of the thesis. Selecting
the chair and other Committee members early is therefore important.
Delaying these decisions can have important consequences for your program.
The first step is to identify the
chair of your Committee. You should not assume that your temporary advisor
will chair your Supervisory Committee. You select your chair. If you find
that you like working with your temporary advisor and feel that this is
the most appropriate chair for you, by all means you should find out
whether he/she would want to serve as your chair. There are no
repercussions from deciding that someone else is a better choice. The
temporary advisor understands this clearly and you should not hesitate to
select the chair that you want. Meet and interact with faculty members.
Learn about their interests and areas of expertise. Think about and
formulate your own professional goals. These are the best guides to
picking the right chair for your Supervisory Committee.
The Committee consists of three
individuals. The chair and co-chair of the Supervisory Committee must be
members of the graduate teaching faculty in the Department of Family,
Youth and Community Sciences. You must have a co-chair. The third or
external member of the Committee should be from another department. If you
are completing a minor, the third member should represent the minor. If
you are not completing a minor, the third member should be someone whose
expertise will help you successfully complete your program of study. In
many cases, students elect an outside member to reflect a secondary area
of interest. For example, you might decide to complement your departmental
courses with supportive course work in aging. In this case, your outside
member should represent this subject matter aspect of your graduate
program. You may delay selection of the external member, but you
should identify this person as early as possible. You must select
this member before you present your proposal for the thesis.
As soon as you
select your Supervisory Committee members, see the Graduate Coordinator,
Dr. Mickie Swisher to submit your Supervisory Committee form. The graduate coordinator must submit this form. This form must be submitted by the end of the
semester in which you complete 9 hours of study. File a revised
supervisory committee appointment form when you add the external member to
your committee.
Program of Study
As soon as you have established your
Supervisory Committee, convene a meeting of the Committee to develop your
program of study. You are responsible for finding a suitable date,
time and meeting place (usually the Department's conference room) for this
and all other Committee meetings. The program of study lists the
courses that you will take to meet the degree requirements for the
Department. Your Supervisory Committee must approve the program of study.
As soon as your members and you have decided what courses you will take,
complete a Program of
Study form. You, your Committee members, and the Graduate Coordinator (Mickie
Swisher) must all sign this form. Do not seek the Dean’s signature.
Rather, give the completed form signed by you, your Committee members and
the Graduate Coordinator the Academic Coordinator.
Completing the Form. The
form has three sections. In the first part of the form (Major), list all of the
courses taken in this department, whether they are required or elective.
The second part of the form (Minor) is for the courses that you take for a
formal minor. If you are not completing a minor, do not list any courses
in this part of the form. The third part of the form contains the
statistics course that you and your Committee select and any elective
courses taken in other departments that are not part of a formal minor.
The Research Project
You should meet with your Supervisory
Committee as early as possible to discuss your proposed research project.
You should meet with your Committee during the second semester of study
and secure approval for your thesis topic. You must present a
formal proposal for the thesis research project. Your proposal must be
approved before you can enroll in FYC 6971 Research for Master’s Thesis.
Under no conditions should you enroll in FYC 6971 or begin work on your
thesis research until you have an approved proposal. This should occur no
later than the beginning of the third semester of study. You should
work closely with your Supervisory Committee and especially with your
chair as you develop the proposal. Remember that the Supervisory Committee
will ultimately decide if the content of your thesis is acceptable and
will conduct an oral examination of your knowledge about the thesis topic
and research methods and issues more generally. Further, your Supervisory
Committee will play a critical role in helping you develop a research
design that will allow you to collect and analyze the data that you will
use for your thesis. They are your most important mentors in this process.
Get them fully involved as early as possible.
If your research involves anything
that affects human beings, including ask them questions, you will need to
complete a IRB-02 form for
approval by a University-wide committee. This process is designed to
ensure the safety and privacy of all people who take part in any kind of
study. The Committee usually meets once a month so you need check those
dates and make sure that you submit the form in a timely fashion.
There is no set way of preparing and
presenting the thesis to the Committee. Some chairs prefer to work
individually with the student so that the first draft of the thesis that
the other members of the Committee see has already undergone extensive
editing and revision. Other chairs prefer that the student submit various
draft versions to the entire Committee. You should consult closely with
your chair to determine the appropriate procedure for obtaining feedback
on draft versions of the thesis.
The Thesis Defense
You should defend your thesis early in
the final semester of study. The date of the defense is driven primarily
by the due
date for submitting a paper copy of the thesis to the Editorial Board
of the Graduate School. This date is usually about one month prior to the
end of the semester. Given that the committee may require fairly extensive
changes and that the Editorial Board may also require changes and has to
review the revised electronic version, it is very unwise to postpone the
defense of the thesis past the middle of the last semester of study.
The thesis defense is open to all
faculty members in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences.
You need to post an announcement of the date, time and location of your
defense and the title of your thesis in the Department at least 10 days
prior to the defense.
You must appoint a student
observer from the Department to be present at your defense. We ask
that you do this to help make absolutely sure that you are treated in a
completely fair and unbiased fashion during the defense. The individual
you appoint is an observer and does not participate actively in the
process. When you are asked to leave the room, the observer should leave,
too.
Two things will happen at the thesis
defense meeting of your Supervisory Committee.
First, the Committee will approve or
reject you thesis. You need to bring a completed copy of the Report
on Thesis or Dissertation and/or Final Examination (click on Final
Examination Form) to the defense. If the Committee feels that the overall
content of your thesis, the quality of the research itself, meets
the standards of the University of Florida, they will check the
"approved" line on this form. If the Committee does not approve
your thesis, you can still proceed with the defense. However, failure to
approve is unusual if you have worked closely with your chair and
Committee as you developed and conducted the research project and wrote
the thesis.
More commonly, members want some
changes made in the thesis, even when they approve the overall content of
the thesis. They may want you to rewrite some sections, add things, delete
things, etc. Bring five original copies of the Electronic
Thesis and Dissertation (EDT) Submission Form printed on 20lb. or
24lb. 100% cotton paper to your defense (originals to you, the Graduate
School, the Department, your chair and the College of Agricultural and
Life Sciences). This is the form that your Committee members sign to
indicate that they do not want any changes made to the thesis and one of
the originals of this form must accompany the paper copy of your thesis
that you submit to the Graduate School for editorial review. Your
Committee members may or may not sign the Submission Form at your defense.
If changes are minor, they may all sign except your chair and give the
chair the responsibility for approving the corrections. Often an
individual member may not sign until he/she can review the changes that
you make specifically on that individual's request. Sometimes members (all
or some) want to see the entire thesis again after the changes have been
made. Your Committee will determine the procedure to be followed. Whatever
the procedure, you must have the EDT Submission Form signed by all
Committee members before you can submit your thesis to the Graduate
School.
The second thing that will happen at this meeting is your defense of your thesis. You will make a formal, professional quality presentation of the thesis to the Committee, usually 20 to 30 minutes. Then the Committee member will ask you questions. These questions will be designed to probe your knowledge of the subject matter covered in your thesis, but also to test your understanding of the research process itself. The questions can be related to any aspect of your thesis. If you successfully defend your thesis, your Committee will check the "satisfactory" line on the Report on Thesis or Dissertation and/or Final Examination Form. Your thesis defense is an open meeting for all faculty members in the department, and, for that matter, other faculty members at the University of Florida. You Supervisory Committee will decide whether non-members actively participate in the examination or not.
You will probably be asked to leave the meeting twice during your defense. Most Committees ask the student to leave at the beginning of the meeting while they decide whether to approve your thesis and agree on details about the conduct of the defense. They will ask you to leave after the defense so that they can decide if you were successful. Don't stray far! These decisions are usually made quickly.
Submitting the Thesis
Submitting the thesis is a three-step
process.
First, make the changes your Committee
members want and give revised copies of the thesis to those members who
want one. After everyone is satisfied, make sure that they have all signed
the EDT Submission Form (remember, five originals on 20lb or 24lb, 100%
cotton paper).
Second, you submit the thesis in hard
(paper) copy to the Graduate School, along with one of the originals of
the EDT Submission Form. Make sure you do not miss (or even come near) the
Graduate School's deadline for submission. The Graduate School reviews
your thesis for format and style. They are very strict. Make
sure you read everything about their requirements at the Editorial
Board's web site. Print and use the writing or editorial guide. Follow
all of the rules to the letter. Even so, the editors will probably find
some mistakes that you will have to correct.
Third, once you have made the
corrections that the Graduate School requested when they reviewed the
paper copy, turn your document into an electronic (PDF) document. There
are templates
and detailed instructions for how to do this at the EDT web site.
Again, follow the guidelines to the rule.
The EDT site also provides a lot of other useful information, links, etc. If you run into any problems, do not hesitate to contact the Graduate School. They are there to help you and do so without hesitation. The Graduate School does provide training in how to submit the electronic version of thesis.
Once your thesis has been submitted, inform your Committee members so that they can print a copy for themselves.
Graduation Day!
Before you graduate, there are a few
other steps that you will need to complete. Consult the Graduate
School site for current students to find out about these.
You do need to complete a
"Request for Graduation Check from Graduate Records." Ask
the Academic Coordinator in the Department to fill out this form and
submit it for you. This ensures that you have met all of the Graduate
School and College requirements, do not have any flags on your records,
etc.
You must complete the Request for
Letter of Certification of Satisfaction of All Degree Requirements. This
form shows that you have met all Department, College and Graduate School
requirements. This is usually submitted near the end of the semester in
which you will graduate.
There are some other forms as well, including an exit survey for the Graduate School, an exit interview with the Department, and an exit interview with the Dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
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