Professional Master's in Occupational Safety and Health (Online) - Student Resources

BuzzPort is Georgia Tech’s primary student portal designed to help you interact with Georgia Tech services and campus colleagues. You can use this portal to track your financial aid application, transfer credit evaluations, and to stay in touch with offices on campus.  

Canvas is the new learning management system (LMS) used by Georgia Tech for online courses. All classroom lectures will be captured, edited, and posted on Canvas for students to view. You’ll also be able to access your course syllabus, course content, assignments, and grades through this cloud-based platform.

DegreeWorks provides a comprehensive set of web-based academic advising, degree audit, and transfer articulation tools to help you and advisors negotiate curriculum requirements. 

Students use the OSCAR portal to access their schedule of classes and other content in the Student Information System (SIS). 

All online master’s students are given access to a Georgia Tech email address. Visit Passport to set up or change your Georgia Tech email address. Once your email is activated, you can access your email online at mail.gatech.edu and will use the same username and password for all Georgia Tech accounts. 

Students enrolled in Georgia Tech online courses have free access to Microsoft Office 365, a collection of services that allow you to collaborate and share your schoolwork. The service includes Office Online (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), unlimited personal cloud storage, and SharePoint sites. To see what’s included, visit the Office 365 Education product page, and then sign up with your Georgia Tech email address. 

You may use Microsoft Teams, an application within the Office 365 online suite, to communicate with other students within the program. Teams is a hub for teamwork, a chat-based workspace that enables teams to be more productive by giving them a single and secure location that brings together everything a team needs: chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools. You can manage and monitor all features in one centralized portal in a digital workspace.

Teams is available on Desktop, Tablet, Browsers, Windows/OS X, iPhone, Droid, Edge, Chrome, Safari.

Learn more on how to access your account here.

Zoom is the interactive, online meeting tool you will use to join live sessions and collaborate with your colleagues. All Georgia Tech students have free Zoom accounts. 

For more details, visit https://gatech.zoom.us/. At the bottom of that webpage are links to help you get started, download the Zoom client, and access support if you need it.

Canvas is Georgia Tech’s learning management platform. This is where students access syllabi, course materials, course schedules, and collaborate with other students. For additional information, review the support articles and videos here.

All students are required to comply with the Academic Honor Code and are strongly encouraged to seek a full understanding of their instructors’ expectations regarding academic honor. 

Anyone who is qualified is welcome to seek admission to Georgia Tech, and anyone who applies for and accepts admission can be confident that the policy and regular practice of the Institute will not discriminate against him or her on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin. The criteria used in determining each applicant’s eligibility for consideration can be found in the admission requirements. 

A student may not apply for transfer credit until after matriculation at Georgia Tech. The courses to be transferred would typically be those appearing on the approved program of study form for the master’s degree. A doctoral student normally does not request transfer credit. The rules relative to and the process for obtaining transfer of credit for graduate-level courses can be found on the Registrar’s website. 

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects the privacy of student education records. All rights can be found on the Registrar’s website. 

We know students face various challenges and demands on their time during the academic semester. If a student needs to step away from their studies at any time, they can do so by dropping or withdrawing from current courses. Students considering stepping away will need to coordinate this with their academic advisor.

All payments of tuition and fees are handled by the Bursar’s office. For instructions on how to pay, please visit the student payment portal.   

The Georgia Tech Bursar’s Office processes refunds via EFT, also known as Direct Deposit, Monday through Friday. Refunds and overpayments are electronically disbursed to the student’s checking or savings account and should be in the students account on the following day or sooner. You are not always eligible for a refund when dropping a course, so please read over the refund policy. 

All students should own a computer with these minimum requirements: 

Form Factor:  Notebook or desktop computer (a netbook or tablet should not be used as the primary computing device*.) A minimum of 6 hours of battery life is recommended. 

Processor:  64-bit multi-core (quad-core or higher) Intel or AMD processor or better. 

Memory:  16 GB or more.  For best performance, install as much memory as affordable at the time of purchase. 

Operating System:  The newest version of Windows (10 or better) or MacOS (10.15 or better). As you progress through the degree program, continue updating to the newest version for better protection against cyber security risks; turning on automatic update can help with this. Before applying software and hardware updates, back up your computer (see below) and ensure the updates will work with your existing applications. 

Browser:  The newest version of Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. 

Primary Hard Drive:  256 GB minimum. You may work with large datasets, so the larger, the better. Solid-state drives (SSDs) are ideal because they’re much faster than hard-disk drives (HDDs). 

Backup Device or Service:  Having a quality backup of your important files is vital to your success as a student. Windows and MacOS have an optional built-in backup support (e.g., via Time Machine on MacOS). For students who would like to take advantage of it, we’ve negotiated a student discount for Crashplan (details at crashplan.com/gtstudent). OneDrive, provided by GT at no charge, is a great solution as well.   

Free GitHub Repositories: Git is an industry-standard way for collaborative coding and version control; many companies now expect git familiarity from employees.  As a Georgia Tech student, you can create unlimited repositories, which are great for group projects. Always set up repositories to be private (instead of public), and never put any sensitive information (e.g., passwords, AWS keys) in them. Criminals scan public repositories for such information and when they find it, it can lead to huge financial loss for victims. Therefore, use your credentials to run AWS jobs. 

Networking:  Wired connection via Ethernet NIC (1Gbe RJ45/Cat5e or better) or a Dual-Band (2.4 GHz/5 GHz) Wireless 802.11 ac-enabled computer and a reliable, fast network connection (recommended minimum 10Mbps down/4Mbps up).  

Accessories:  A laptop or desktop with a webcam and microphone (built-in or external). Also, although you aren’t required to use a headset with a microphone, they often help students communicate more clearly during video-conference sessions. 

*Most netbooks and tablets (e.g., Apple iPad, Galaxy Tab, and others that run on an operating system designed specifically for the device) do NOT meet the minimum hardware requirements above. They tend to provide sufficient performance for basic tasks, such as web browsing or simple word processing; however, using courses’ technical software may not be possible. 

Office of Information Technology (OIT) strives to offer the necessary tools for students to accomplish collaboration, research, scholarship, and innovation.  

IT Resources for online master’s students 

For generation information visits oit.gatech.edu or contact them at: 

Office of Information Technology 
Phone: 404-894-7173 
Email: support@oit.gatech.edu