The Inter-University Doctoral Consortium (IUDC) allows Stony Brook PhD students to enroll in courses at participating institutions and get full credit for them. While the IUDC includes many universities, Stony Brook students mostly take courses at NYU and CUNY.
For a full list of all participating institutions, please consult Stony Brook’s IUDC website:
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/grad/academics/consortium.php
This website also has the full instructions for how to enroll in an IUDC course. The rest of this chapter provides additional tips and hints with this process.
You can take only one IUDC course per semester. This is a corollary of the university requirement that the majority of your courses must be LIN courses at Stony Brook.
Remember that your class selection must be finalized by the end of week 2, and that includes any IUDC courses you want to take. Due to the many signatures and approvals involved in the IUDC process, it can take a long time before you are officially enrolled in an IUDC course. Get the process started early, at least a month before the semester starts.
While you have to get signatures from the GPD and the Grad School first before the IUDC course instructor gets to sign, that does not mean that you should not talk to the instructor first. You should reach out to them first to see if they are willing to let you enroll in the course. Only if you have their informal consent, should you start the official process.
The IUDC form isn’t just a formality. It requires multiple parties to give you their permission to enroll. Common reasons for a denial of permission include:
This is also mentioned on the website, but it merits repeating: IUDC courses are only for students in the second year of the PhD or higher.
Unless you live in New York City, the commute to NYU or CUNY will take up a good chunk of your day (and let’s not even talk about Rutgers or Princeton). In addition, the train tickets are expensive. The GSO offers some funding to offset the cost, but as with all reimbursement processes it will take a while before you get your money back.
The Department advises that you do not take any IUDC courses in the semester before your advancement to candidacy date. Usually, this means that you should not take any IUDC courses during your sixth semester (typically the spring semester in your third year, when you’re working on QP2) in the program. This is because IUDC courses can take a long time to show up on your transcript, and students cannot be advanced to candidacy if any of their courses are still missing a grade.