General Technical Elective Courses

Students in Electrical & Computer Engineering majors are required to take a number of General Technical Elective courses as part of their graduation requirements.  These courses must be at the 300 or 400 level, and be in a STEM-related field.  Students have the option of taking General Technical Elective courses from outside of the department or take additional ENEE or CMSC courses to fulfill the requirement.

Approved Gen Tech Courses

The ECE Undergraduate Office has prepared a list of approved Gen Tech Courses that students typically have the prerequisites for and are able to take. Gen Tech courses cannot appear on the prohibited course list or be designed for "non-major" students (i.e. ASTR course for non-Astronomy majors). 

Electrical Engineering General Technical Elective Requirements 

Electrical Engineering majors are expected to complete 12 credits of General Technical Electives. As part of these General Technical Electives, EE students must successfully complete one 400-level mathematics course.

Computer Engineering General Technical Elective (Category F) Requirements 

Computer Engineering majors are expected to complete a General Technical Elective course to satisfy the Category F requirement for their program.  

Additional Courses

Upper-level courses which do not appear on the approved Gen Tech Courses list may be approved on a case-by-case basis by the ECE Department. To be approved, such courses must be consistent with the student’s stated professional goals and include a technical component. Under no circumstances will exceptions be granted for courses on the prohibited list (see below). Please contact your academic advisor to start the evaluation process.

Special Programs

Students who plan to use relevant minor courses as General Technical Electives must make sure that they have 9 additional unique credits for their minor.  These 9 unique credits cannot be used for major requirements. For example, if a minor consists of five 3-credit courses, two of the courses can be used as General Technical Electives and the other three courses would not count for the major.

Students in the Gemstone program may use 3 of the 4 upper-level GEMS courses as Gen Techs: GEMS396, GEMS397, GEMS496, and GEMS497. No more than 6 credits of GEMS can count as General Technical Electives. Quest, Honors, and Hinman CEO students may use their 300-400 level courses as General Technical Electives (except capstone courses). NAVY ROTC students can use NAVY300 and NAVY400 for their Gen Tech Electives. No other ROTC courses can be used for General Technical Electives. Approved courses can be found at the bottom of the Gen Tech Courses page.

Course Permissions

Students should be aware that ECE advisors cannot provide permission stamps for courses in other departments.  It will be the student's responsibility to contact the course department to get the appropriate permission stamps.  Please note that some courses may not be available until the beginning of the semester in which you wish to enroll. To request permission for courses in other engineering departments, please use this page for non-major course permission: https://eng.umd.edu/advising/course-permission.