The objectives of the Ph.D. program are to provide students opportunities to reach a critical understanding of the basic scientific and engineering principles underlying their fields of interest and to cultivate their ability to apply these principles creatively through advanced methods of analysis, research, and synthesis. The Ph.D. degree is awarded primarily based on the student's research contributions. Applicants for the doctoral degree must have a degree in an engineering discipline and must meet the approval of the department's graduate committee. Ph.D. students must take the qualifying exams within the first year of enrollment. These qualifying examinations consist of two parts. The first part covers the four disciplines of petroleum engineering: production, drilling, reservoir engineering, and formation evaluation. Students have two opportunities to take and successfully pass the first part of the qualifying exams. If students cannot pass the exams in all four disciplines by the second attempt, the student will have to drop the Ph.D. program. The second part of the qualifying examination is an oral defense of the dissertation proposal.