For the Engineer degrees, 162 units are required, plus an acceptable thesis. The Department further requires 24 units of thesis registration, and that at least 90 units, consisting of no less than eight subjects (none less than 9 units), of the 162 required units be graduate "H" subjects. Subjects in which the grade received is C, D, or F will not be accepted in fulfillment of the unit requirement for the EE or ECS degree. A Master's thesis of superior quality will satisfy the EE or ECS thesis requirement. When the Master's thesis grade is reported, the thesis supervisor is asked to certify that, should the EE or ECS degree eventually be sought, the Master's thesis meets the required criteria for quality.

"EECS is Everywhere."

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is the largest department at MIT, annually preparing hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students for career leadership in fields such as academia, biomedical technology, finance, consulting, law, nanotechnology, and more. MIT EECS consistently tops the U.S. News & World Report and other college rankings and is widely recognized for its world-class faculty, who provide outstanding education and conduct innovative and award-winning research.

As of January 2018, EECS enrolled 1,274 undergraduate majors and 1,943 graduate students. In 2016-17, the department awarded 143 undergraduate, 260 master’s, and 94 doctoral degrees.

Nearly 130 EECS faculty members find their research homes in four major affiliate labs: the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Faculty members' interdisciplinary approach and collaborative thinking cut across these labs, throughout MIT, and into industry and academia worldwide.

From robots that perform with professional dance troupes to medical electronic devices that harvest energy from differences in body temperature, EECS's work improves the quality of life for people throughout the world. Think of some things you use every day; chances are that EECS has had a hand in them. For example: the World Wide Web (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, CSAIL), the conversion of analog to digital TV (Jae S. Lim, RLE), building more reliable grids through development of systems behavior algorithms (work of Munther A. Dahleh, LIDS and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, or IDSS), new MRI scanning technologies (Elfar Adalsteinsson, RLE), and many more.