Bachelor’s – CLASIC Accelerated Master’s Program

The BAM requires a total of 146 credit hours. BAM undergraduate students can take up to twelve graduate credit hours, with six credits counting toward both degrees.

Bachelor’s Accelerated Master’s from BA in Linguistics to MS in Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search and Informatics (CLASIC)

The Linguistics Department and the Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search and Informatics MS Program offer a Bachelor's – Accelerated Master's degree program for students with strong abilities and motivations who are interested in computational linguistics. A student in this program begins graduate coursework as part of the BA and continues in the CLASIC Program after receiving the BA to complete the MS within three semesters.

Before You Apply

You should consult with both your Linguistics undergraduate advisor and the CLASIC graduate advisor when you are considering applying to this program. Planning should generally begin while selecting the courses for the fall term of your sophomore year, and you should apply to the BAM during your junior year. Before your application to the BAM program is approved, you must declare the Computational Linguistics undergraduate track and complete the following prerequisites:

  • Start with programming, preferably CSCI 1300 Computer Science 1 (requires Calculus 1) or LING 1200 Programming for Linguistics
  • Take 2 of the 3 CompLing track core courses (which require LING 2000 as a prerequisite and may have CS prerequisites as well)
    • LING 4632/5632 Machine Learning and Linguistics
    • LING /CSCI 3832/5832 Computational Linguistics
    • LING 4200/5200 Computational Corpus Linguistics
  • Take as an elective one of the following courses in Computer Science:
    • CSCI 3104 Algorithms (requires Calculus 2)
    • CSCI 3022 Introduction to Data Science with Probability and Statistics (requires CSCI 1300 CS 1 and CSCI 2270 CS 2: Data Structures)
    • CSCI 2824 Discrete Structures (requires CSCI 1300)

In addition, you must have completed by or be enrolled in a 5000-level course, called the qualifying course, in the semester of your junior year in which you apply to the BAM program. These courses are as follows:

  • LING 5420 Morphology and Syntax (if you have not already taken LING 4420)
  • LING 5030 Linguistic Phonetics
  • LING 5430 Semantics & Pragmatics

Your admission to the BAM program will not be decided until midterm or final grades for one of these graduate-level courses have been made available to the admissions committee. We will occasionally consider requests to use a different LING MA course as the qualifying course.

Undergraduates cannot register for graduate courses directly. If you want to take one before you are accepted into the BAM, contact Kris Stenzel atclasic_contact@colorado.edu, who will work with the appropriate program (CS or LING)to register you for that course.

Application Deadlines

Fall applications: before October 25.

Spring applications: before Spring Break.

Applying

At least two weeks before the application deadline, you must complete the BAM “intent application” on the Graduate School website.

Your application also requires:

a)Two recommendations, which must be from:

  • the instructor of one of the CS courses you have taken; and
  • the instructor of your LING qualifying course.

Talk to the two instructors in advance to see if they agree to be recommenders. They do not need to write formal letters - CLASIC will contact them with an online form.

Fill in the CLASIC BAM Student Waiver form, which will ask for the instructors' names and email addresses. Your Waiver form will be routed to CLASIC and we will contact the instructors to request theirrecommendations.
Complete the Waiver form at least two weeks before theSpring or Fallapplication deadline so that we have time to contact the instructors and receive their recommendations.

b) A current unofficial transcript,sent toclasic_contact@colorado.edu.

c) A short personal statementwith any information relevant for the admissions committee.
Note! This is not required, it is only for special circumstances that need clarification.

If your application to the BAM program is not approved or if you decide to withdraw from the program, any graduate courses that you have completed satisfactorily will count towards the undergraduate degree as upper division electives or as replacements for the corresponding required courses (5420 for 4420, 5430 for 3430, 5030 + 5410 for 3100). Consult the Graduate Advisor for full information and advice.

Course of Study

To complete the BAM program, you will meet the requirements for the BA + the requirements for the MS. However, 6 of your graduate credits may be double counted for both degrees.

Prior to receiving your BA, y