[HN Gopher] OMSCS Open Courseware
___________________________________________________________________
OMSCS Open Courseware
Author : kerim-ca
Score : 215 points
Date : 2025-12-06 19:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sites.gatech.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sites.gatech.edu)
| dannyfreeman wrote:
| I would like to get my masters from georgia tech's omscs program
| but between work and 2 kids I dont see how I'll ever have the
| time
| marai2 wrote:
| One course per semester might be doable? Not sure how
| frequently the assignments are due because you could probably
| carve out some time over the weekends.
| dannyfreeman wrote:
| Yeah, thinking about waiting until both the kids themselves
| are in school and then 1 course a semester for me. Not sure
| if that will be easier or harder than doing it while they are
| young
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| OMSCS grad here. The awesome thing about the program is its
| flexibility. Some of the courses are definitely more time
| intensive, but I think if you took only one class and
| dedicated about an hour a day to the course materials,
| you'd be in good shape. (I know that's still a _lot_ to ask
| of someone with two young kids.)
| krapht wrote:
| There's no way to get through the harder courses in the
| program on 1 hour a day. And you're not getting value
| from the degree if you aren't pushing yourself to take
| those hard courses, unless you just need the diploma.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Is a masters of really holding anyone back once you have
| a couple years of experience?
| dannyfreeman wrote:
| I just enjoy school, nothing is holding me back.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| There's a web site where different people share what they think
| of each course, and how many hours they devote per week:
| https://www.omscentral.com/
|
| That might help you decide whether it's doable.
|
| My first (and only) course was somewhere in the middle in terms
| of effort, and the courses I was most interested would have
| required another 50% on top, which wasn't going to work for me,
| between work, parenting, other learning etc.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I did it with two kids (both were in school at that point,
| which helps). It -is- a lot of work. I spent maybe an hour a
| day during most days of the week, and then for some things I'd
| try to get a few more hours early or late in the day on the
| weekend. And for the most part I only did one class per
| semester. I did two for one semester because they were both
| expected to be fairly easy, and that worked out, but I
| definitely wouldn't do that with GA or any of the ML stuff.
|
| It's doable, that's all I'm saying. But you will definitely
| need to be committed to see it through to the end, and you will
| be happy to have your life back when you're done.
| dannyfreeman wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that! I still have a lot of time to think
| about enrolling thankfully.
| ludwik wrote:
| As a childless OMSCS graduate, I also can't imagine doing it
| while having kids, because it took basically all of my free
| time. That said, I met quite a few people in the program who
| were in situations similar to yours. I have no idea how they
| managed it, but they somehow did.
| hasyimibhar wrote:
| I completed OMSCS with 2 kids (both preschool), taking 1 class
| per semester from Fall 2019 to Spring 2023. It was possible
| thanks to having full remote job and a very supportive wife. I
| learned a lot, but I probably wouldn't do it again, it was
| extremely unhealthy, especially for certain classes like
| Distributed Computing (CS7210).
| Jesus_piece wrote:
| Why was it extremely unhealthy? The work load? The lack of
| sleep with work, kids, and school? Asking because I'm sorta
| in the same position
| legerdemain wrote:
| Specifically CS7210 is demanding because of its
| assignments. The assignments come from UW's CSE452, have
| very little direct connection with the course lectures, and
| require you to implement a Paxos-like system correctly,
| basically in one shot, in an environment that is very
| difficult to debug. So the projects turn into 60-80-hour
| slogs where students change parameters semi-randomly until
| something starts working. CS7210 shares that aspect with a
| number of other courses in the program.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| is there a decent list of omscs courses to avoid on this
| basis?
| hasyimibhar wrote:
| Mostly lack of sleep and having to sacrifice a lot of
| weekends to work on the assignments. I took OMSCS with the
| goal of learning as much as possible since I did not have a
| traditional CS degree, so I took all the hard classes in
| the Computing Systems track (DC, Compilers, ISL:BE, IHPC,
| etc).
|
| CS7210 (DC) is the hardest class I took. We had to write a
| correct Paxos implementation, then use it to build a
| distributed sharded KV store. I remember having to spend
| 10+ hours on a single day during weekend. It was worth it
| though, learned a lot about distributed consensus, and how
| difficult it is to get right (there were test failures that
| were fixed after hours of debug, and the fix was literally
| changing the order of some code lol).
| dannyfreeman wrote:
| That's one of the classes I would really like to take. If
| I end up doing it the kids might spend a lot of time with
| grandma that semester.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| OMSCS requires ten courses to graduate. I completed one course
| (with an A grade) before realizing that, even at a pace of one
| course per semester, it was not a high enough priority for me to
| devote the time required to do each course well.
|
| That course was great, though, and I definitely learned some
| things I'm glad to have learned!
|
| IMO the instructional materials are a small part of the value.
| The things that stood out to me were:
|
| - the assignments
|
| - the autograding of programming assignments
|
| - giving and receiving peer feedback about written assignments
|
| - learning some LaTeX for those assignments
|
| - having an artificial reason (course grade) to persist in
| improving my algorithm and code [on the problems taught in that
| course, I wouldn't have been self-motivated enough if they were
| just things I came across during a random weekend]
| lumost wrote:
| The ability of OMSCS to scale paper writing, review, and
| grading with real human TAs is nothing short of astounding.
| While it's a ton of work (I'm just completing class #5) it's a
| great resource for both learning the material - and how to
| communicate it effectively.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Things that I loved about the program:
|
| * My fellow classmates. Had a small study group where we got on
| Discord to hang out and it was a blast
|
| * The TAs - they were so dedicated to the students and
| fantastic. MVPs of the program
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Oh yeah I forgot to mention the class discussion board.
|
| I wasn't in any discord groups but the class discussion forum
| was a nice community.
| mgrat wrote:
| Very cool, thanks for posting this. I've had a number of
| colleagues try to level up through programs like this with mixed
| outcomes.
| loph wrote:
| I have taken three of those classes as part of the Online Master
| of Cybersecurity program. They were all excellent. I can say that
| the assignments were an important part of the learning
| experience, for instance the practical experience of attacking
| weak RSA keys.
|
| I would not let the lack of assignments, tests, and quizzes stop
| you from trying these if you are interested. At a minimum, they
| would give you a feeling for what the program/s are like, and
| possibly encourage you to enroll into the online degree program,
| which is an exceptional value.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Has anyone tried the courses in the ML or core CS areas? What'd
| you think?
| ssnola504 wrote:
| The ML course is interesting. Some of the lectures are a bit
| chatty and the official course text book was written in 1997,
| but it's a great survey of many different ML models, including
| Neural Networks. It's a good segue into Deep Learning where you
| explore more advanced NN architectures, beyond Feed-Forward
| NNs.
|
| For core CS, I found Graduate Intro to Operating Systems very
| rewarding.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I really can't imagine that these online degrees have any real
| value in the modern world of LLM-assited coding - there's no way
| anyone looking at a resume would think such institutional online
| degrees still have any value. Perhaps there is some educational
| value for the student, but even there the only real value is the
| organizational structure - you might as well form an online study
| group on discord for free, and get the same learning benefit,
| just have an LLM write up the syllabus for a course based on a
| good textbook, no instructor overhead needed.
| xbar wrote:
| I am not sure what your point is. Is it that no CS is valuable
| or that only certain CS degrees are valuable?
| mym1990 wrote:
| The OMSCS degree you get is equivalent to the in person one, so
| there is no way to make the distinction in an interview. I
| actually don't see how people see that an experience like this
| brings _no_ value, given the rigor of the assignments. One
| certainly would come out with a better knowledge of how things
| work, develop a better work ethic, and hopefully make some
| network connections on the way...
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| This is very debatable. The courses look like they were
| recorded in the 90s.
|
| The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB
| course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd
| expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a
| tutorial not a university course.
|
| If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and
| the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university
| Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.
| __loam wrote:
| DB is known to be a weaker offering.
|
| https://www.omscentral.com/
| rybosworld wrote:
| Respectfully, I think you should do more research.
|
| The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the
| tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th
| ranked computer science school in the U.S.
|
| The university make no distinction between students who
| take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's
| are identical.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Is this a common thing to have at university? I'm from one
| of top universities in Poland; our database courses never
| included anything more than basic SQL where cursors were
| the absolute end. Even at Masters.
| redbluered wrote:
| Yes. It is. Your database course was apparently broken.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I can tell you something scarier.
|
| My specialisation was databases there.
|
| ...
|
| Do not worry, I do not work with databases in
| professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given
| a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a
| focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even
| knowing how databases work inside.
|
| Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or
| go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that
| knowledge was not was my uni gave me...
|
| I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.
| linguae wrote:
| I've taken graduate-level courses in databases, including
| one on DBMS implementations and another on large-scale
| distributed systems, and I also spent two summers at Google
| working on Cloud SQL and Spanner. Database research goes
| further than DBMS implementation research. There is a lot
| of research on schemas, data representation, logic, type
| systems, and more. It's just like how programming language
| research goes beyond compilers research.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I don't think watching the lectures is the hurdle that
| anyone at OMSCS is trying to jump. The program has a pretty
| low graduation rate, and the tests are known to be fairly
| difficult, which essentially requires the student to do
| work outside of class or go to the resources available
| through GT to understand the material. I can look up the
| highest quality lectures on any subject on YouTube, it
| doesn't mean I will understand any of it without the proper
| legwork.
|
| FWIW I meant the diploma is identical, the actual
| experience will obviously vary. Some people will get better
| outcomes online, some will get better outcomes in person.
| t_mann wrote:
| > there is no way to make the distinction in an interview
|
| Just ask?
|
| Some online degrees state that they're equivalent, but
| interviewers may still have their own opinions. I would
| discourage anyone from failing to mention the online nature
| of a degree in their CV. You're really not doing yourself a
| favor. A rigorous online degree is something to be proud of.
| I see people with PhD's proudly announcing their online
| course certificates on LinkedIn. However, 'discovering' that
| an education was of a different nature than one had assumed
| based on the presented materials may raise questions.
| mym1990 wrote:
| This just reeks of you being insecure and thinking online
| education is of lower quality than in person education. Are
| you also pining for everyone to go back to the office? The
| degree GT gives you is _literally_ the same thing as the in
| person degree. If GT does not make the distinction, why
| would I???
|
| Here is a tip: maybe don't assume so much!
| rs186 wrote:
| > interviewers may still have their own opinions
|
| That says nothing other than that the interviewers have a
| narrow mind and/or are ignorant. OMSCS is a very well known
| program, and it's their problem if they don't know it.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The whole point is, if an LLM can easily complete rigoruous
| assignments and all the student has to do is add a little bit
| of personalization to the output, then has that student
| really learned anything? Can they evem come up with a plan to
| do such tasks without the LLM, even if it takes a lot longer
| without it?
|
| Educational certifications in the era of LLMs are going to be
| increasingly meaningless without proof-of-work, and that's
| going to mean in-class work without access to computational
| aids, if you really want to evaluate a person's skill level.
| This of course is the coding interview rationalization - CS
| students have been gaming auto-graded courses created by CS
| professors for some decades, and now that's easier than ever.
| mym1990 wrote:
| There is absolutely no way you're passing OMSCS tests if
| you're winging it on the other assignments, and the tests
| usually account for over 50% of the grade. Certifications
| you're right about but there are ways to test knowledge
| without asking for code snippets.
| rs186 wrote:
| You might as well simply claim "I don't see a CS degree has any
| value these days". OMSCS is not any less than a "real" graduate
| school program experience.
| grantgallagher wrote:
| I'm an OMSCS grad - the dedication to making higher education in
| CS more accessible is something that really sticks out to me from
| those in charge (shoutout to Dr. Joyner who heads the program).
| Although not every course is on the Open Courseware (nor course
| work), there's still a lot of good material, and if you like it
| enough, the program is a nice little side quest in ones journey
| through computer science.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| Hi is there a way to view the lectures in a more traditional
| way? For example, as one long video? I'm seeing lessons broken
| up into 2-5 minute long videos.
| bubblethink wrote:
| ffmpeg
| jay3ss wrote:
| This is how I've done it. Some courses have short lectures
| from 30s to 2.5min which can be annoying
| analog31 wrote:
| I didn't quickly find the entrance requirements for the OMSCS
| program and the other similar programs. I know someone who has an
| undergraduate arts degree and is learning programming and CS
| voraciously, but not in any organized fashion.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| What do you mean? https://omscs.gatech.edu/admission-criteria
| analog31 wrote:
| Thanks. Don't know how I missed it.
| __loam wrote:
| AOS destroyed me lol. Video Game Design is excellent. Graduate
| algo is a requirement for everyone and has great lectures if
| you're looking for an introductory course.
| warabe wrote:
| I once considered applying, but I gave up because collecting
| letters of recommendation was a major hurdle. My academic advisor
| from university has already retired...
|
| How do you all deal with this?
| thisoneisreal wrote:
| I hit the same roadblock unfortunately. My academic references
| were all in a different field and I hadn't really stayed in
| contact except with one professor, who sadly has died. I did
| see that there's an option to use professional references, so
| even though I haven't done this myself, one route you could
| consider taking is to get references from managers, colleagues
| etc. who can speak to your technical knowledge. I agree though
| with your general point that after being out of an academic
| environment for a while that requirement becomes challenging.
| great_wubwub wrote:
| I have not applied to this program but I've gone through a
| part-time MBA. I doubt that an online program for working
| professionals is as rigorous about references as, say,
| undergrad admission to an Ivy League program or Oxford or
| Hogwarts or something. Just get a couple of coworkers with a
| similar advanced degree to write something that says "this
| person exists and I think they can handle the load" and you'll
| be fine. Remember that college is a business; if you look like
| you can both handle the program and pay for it, they'll let you
| in.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Unless something has changed recently, the letters of
| recommendation are pretty much a formality. If you have a
| bachelor's in CS with decent grades, getting admitted isn't
| difficult. I was pretty flippant about the whole thing, applied
| one afternoon on a whim after reading about it on HN. Asked my
| manager for a letter of recommendation as well as my nearest
| colleague. No letters from anyone in academia.
|
| I think the people who have the most difficulty getting
| accepted are those without a bachelor's in CS who also don't
| have some good CS fundamentals courses to show achievement and
| interest.
|
| I did complete the program, and I am happy for the
| accomplishment. But with my experience (I started working in
| the mid 90s) this wasn't for my career, it was for my own
| satisfaction. But in addition to being glad for the
| achievement, I was soooo glad to be done, LOL. The real
| commitment is not financial, it is time.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Get recommendations from supervisors you've had. Academic
| references are hard to obtain for most professionals 5-10 years
| out of school unless they've made a particular effort to stay
| in contact with undergrad faculty members. They understand this
| and take it into consideration.
| bubblethink wrote:
| I don't think OMSCS is that selective. Get a couple of letters
| from your former professors and/or bosses. Letters are
| supplementary, not the sole determinant. More than the letters,
| they likely care about your GPA and GRE.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| They don't even require the GRE. They have a very high
| acceptance rate but a pretty low completion rate.
| sthu11182 wrote:
| Last time I heard (like 3 years ago), the acceptance rate
| was 80%. The completion rate is much lower.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| I got two letters from managers at work and one from a friend
| who I work with.
| oaxacaoaxaca wrote:
| I was in the very first cohort of this program. I loved it but
| had to drop for personal/family reasons after finishing three
| courses. Someday I'd love to jump back in! I highly recommend it
| to anyone who might be interested.
| cgearhart wrote:
| I was also in the first cohort. Graduated in 2016. Transformed
| my career. 100% would recommend.
| oaxacaoaxaca wrote:
| Oh boy, love to hear that. Would be willing to share how
| exactly it transformed your career?
| cgearhart wrote:
| I had been working in civil service for the US Navy for
| about 10 years in operations research & systems
| engineering. It was _very_ hard to break out of that role
| to any private industry--especially for the ML roles I
| wanted, which I think was partially because my undergrad
| degree was MechEng.
|
| OMSCS allowed me to add MSCS to my resume, with additional
| networking and work experience details as a TA for the
| algorithms and Computational Photography courses. Suddenly
| I started getting a lot more calls back. About 6 months
| after graduation I had moved to the SFBay (to work for
| Udacity) and within 2 years I was an ML engineer at Apple
| where I remain today. I don't think any of that would've
| happened without OMSCS.
| oaxacaoaxaca wrote:
| Whoa! Incredible! Talk about a OMSCS success story. Thank
| you for sharing - this is seriously going to serve as
| motivation fuel for me to get back into it.
| cgearhart wrote:
| Best of luck! I hope it's as amazing for you as it was
| for me.
| guiambros wrote:
| Current OMSCS grad student; three down, seven to go. Loving the
| program so far.
|
| The content is great, and most of it is available on Open
| Courseware, YT, etc, but here's what else you get by officially
| going through the program:
|
| - the amazing community of TAs
|
| - the assignments
|
| - the feedback on reports & projects (either automated, or
| through TAs)
|
| - the collaboration with other students on Ed, Discord, Slack,
| etc
|
| - the forcing function of deadlines, having to study for exams,
| etc
|
| - free access to academic libraries, IEEE, ACM, O'Reilly, etc
|
| - access to software and services, educational packages from
| GitHub, Wolfram, Google Colab Pro, student discount in a bunch of
| places, etc
|
| Another underrated aspect is GT's ability to preserve rigor of
| the program overall, despite the scale and number of students in
| some courses (the most popular ones have 1,000-1,500 students per
| semester).
|
| If you're on the fence on applying, I strongly recommend you do.
| The program is affordable enough that there's no harm in trying
| for a few semesters to see if matches what you're looking for.
|
| Glad to answer any questions.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| In reference to the open courseware, is there a way to either
| just download all of the videos in bulk, or view them as part
| of a single video? It looks like they're broken down into ~2
| minute long video clips through the Ed platform, which is very
| annoying.
| jay3ss wrote:
| You can download the lectures from many of the courses, but
| not all, from the site.
| guiambros wrote:
| Annoying indeed. I created a script using ffmpeg to merge all
| the 2-min clips into a longer video per chapter[1], so I
| could watch the lectures on my commute.
|
| You may need to tweak for different courses, but I've used
| for ML4T, GIOS, and ML, and it has been _incredibly helpful_.
|
| [1] https://github.com/guiambros/vidcat
| rdudek wrote:
| You'll get there! Some of them you can take two at a time. I
| myself only need 3 more!
| guiambros wrote:
| _> ... you can take two at a time_
|
| I wish! I travel quite a bit for work, so it breaks my legs
| every time it happens. Plus family, kids activities, etc. ML
| was brutal this semester, but hoping the curve will help a
| bit.
|
| But it's ok, slow and steady is the way to go. Besides, I'm
| doing this for the fun of it; I don't need the diploma for
| career or anything.
|
| See you around!
| fuzztester wrote:
| What does "three down, seven to go" mean?
|
| Unfamiliar with us academic terms.
| exogenousdata wrote:
| The program requires 10 courses to graduate. The parent
| comment has completed 3 courses and has 7 courses remaining.
| rs186 wrote:
| In the past they made videos available via Udacity, which were
| removed after Udacity turned their focus to short & easy (which
| often means superficial) courses for enterprise training instead
| of "serious" university courses. I guess that was not a viable
| business.
|
| Of course they did not come with any assignments, just like these
| courses. Can't blame them, but other universities offer much
| resources -- for the same topic, you can often find a course
| offered by another university that provides videos hosted on
| YouTube, full assignments and labs, even exams. The only thing
| you are missing is TA/office hours and the course credit. In
| other words, unless you actually want to earn credits and work
| towards a degree, I suggest that you skip OMSCS videos unless
| there is no alternative.
| storus wrote:
| Udacity recently released their own MS AI though with shaky
| accreditation via Malta's MFHEA which was recently rejected by
| EQAR, making it unaccredited abroad.
| cgearhart wrote:
| I was the head of enterprise curriculum in 2018 and an OMSCS
| grad in 2016. This was a weird time to work for Udacity and the
| company went thru a major shakeup in 2019. The "breakup" with
| GT happened before the focus on enterprise and the enterprise
| focus was somewhat short-lived as the CEO was replaced just as
| enterprise was ascending as the primary revenue stream. COVID
| was _rough_ for Udacity, and content production was
| commoditized.
| justin66 wrote:
| That's counterintuitive. If COVID couldn't bring in business,
| what could?
| rs186 wrote:
| I imagine what it means is basically, "Before COVID,
| universities had to collaborate with Udacity to produce
| these courses and manage course credits/online degrees. Now
| they realized that they can easily do it themselves
| (perhaps at the institution level)"
| cgearhart wrote:
| Nah. There was some of that as the tools available to
| unis improved alongside Udacity, but it was a very
| intentional choice. The business with GT made $X/year
| while the consumer & enterprise businesses brought in
| $20X/year. It seemed like we could maybe double the OMSCS
| or scale linearly with effort by making more
| partnerships, meanwhile the other lines scaled faster
| with much less effort. Terminating this partnership was
| just one of the business lines that got cut off to focus
| everything on the lines that were growing much faster.
| cgearhart wrote:
| In 2013-2016 Udacity was very actively collaborating with
| GT and had in-house content production. The projects were
| designed by highly experienced instructors in direct
| partnerships with real companies to make them realistic and
| relevant, and there was a small army of hand-picked mentors
| and graders to review and provide feedback.
|
| Unemployment was _relatively_ high at that time, so
| individual consumers were eager to invest their own time &
| money to upskill and differentiate themselves. By 2018
| unemployment hit record lows and suddenly it was
| _employers_ who were struggling to attract talent and
| wanted to differentiate themselves by offering upskill
| training as a benefit along with highly intentional
| training programs to organically grow the hard-to-hire
| talent from their existing workforce. This precipitated a
| shift from huge growth in the consumer side to growth in
| the enterprise business.
|
| Contemporaneously, platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight
| commoditized content creation. Pluralsight bragged that it
| cost them $15k to launch a new course--orders of magnitude
| less than it cost us in house. Udacity pivoted away from
| high quality in house production to more partnerships with
| external content creators and identified the project
| grading and mentorship services as the largest cost drivers
| of ongoing course support costs.
|
| As growth wasn't tracking fast enough, Udacity closed most
| of the international offices--except India--then had two
| rounds of layoffs where the remaining content production
| was practically eliminated, and the mentorship and grading
| were commoditized by transferring the programs to the
| Udacity India office to administrate. All the hand-picked
| and trained graders and mentors were eliminated.
|
| Then COVID hit. (I was gone by then.) I heard Udacity
| raised a debt round, but I think they were stuck against
| headwinds from the past few years. Eventually they were
| acquired for an "undisclosed sum".
|
| So what could have brought in more business? IMO, focusing
| on what was working for us, not trying to pivot into what
| worked for someone else. The problem I think is that we
| weren't on track to make a reasonable return on all the
| money raised. We were trying to swing for the fences, even
| if it meant eventually striking out.
| justin66 wrote:
| What are some of the best university CS or engineering courses
| offered openly, with assignments, in this way that _aren't_
| from MIT or Stanford?
| rs186 wrote:
| CMU's database courses are a famous example:
| https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025/
|
| Princeton used to offer algorithm courses on Coursera with
| full assignments including auto grading, I don't know if
| that's still the case.
|
| I don't know enough about (or have time to learn) other
| offerings, but I am sure there are a few more out there.
| Class central should be a good place to discover those
| courses.
| justin66 wrote:
| Thanks, yes, those are ones I know about, I guess because
| of the prominence of some of the professors. I'm curious
| about the ones that people view as hidden gems, since I
| didn't know about OMSCS until today.
|
| I don't view class central as being useful, could really
| use much more detailed filtering of results.
| storus wrote:
| UTexas seems to be crushing it in the ML/AI space as they offer
| far more recent courses with deeper topics; for everything else
| OMSCS is probably a better choice even though it has a relentless
| pace of busywork making even easy classes draining. Stanford OTOH
| is like GT and UT merged together (both crazy difficult projects
| and a lot of math), but at 2x the pace. UT is way more relaxing
| than either, one can take 3 courses alongside a job and be fine,
| which is next to impossible at GT and Stanford. Conversely, if
| one wants to continue by doing research, Stanford and GT are much
| more useful due to ample opportunities to do so.
| sanufar wrote:
| Could you elaborate more on continuing with research?
| storus wrote:
| GT used to have a collaboration with Meta's FAIR and one
| could do final projects in the DL and NLP classes on recent
| research topics from Meta AI; some people ended up at top
| conferences with their work. Not sure how it's going to be
| now given Meta effectively disbanding FAIR in favor of Wang's
| Superintelligence. GT also has team research project under
| VIP (Vertically Integrated Projects) where a prof leads a
| team of students towards new findings; there are also a bunch
| of PhD seminars one can take. Stanford has a plenty of CS3xx
| research classes one can take where the final project has to
| be some novel research.
| LTL_FTC wrote:
| I have been considering the OMSCS program for some time but one
| of my reservations is the network one misses out on by working
| side by side with students and faculty vs online ed.
|
| For context: non-traditional student who transferred to UCSD for
| college, two of those years were spent during Covid. Moved back
| to Bay Area. My network isn't as big as someone who maybe went to
| San Jose state. And so they prob have an easier time finding
| jobs. I worked with other students through discord and so on,
| attended virtual office hours with professors and TAs (who were
| the reason many of us passed these classes, I'm sure) but never
| truly built a relationship that lasted beyond the quarter because
| zoom, essentially.
|
| And if I go back to grad school, I would really love to build
| relationships with others around me. Wondering how others have
| managed with this regard?
| schneems wrote:
| I wrote about my experiences in OMSCS here
| https://schneems.com/2017/07/26/omscs-omg-is-an-online-maste....
| It took about 7 years, but I finally got my degree.
| bayareapsycho wrote:
| This program was so good, I was most of the way through it before
| it managed to help me land a better job. But now I have no idea
| if I'll ever finish it because it's pretty time consuming
|
| The best two classes are AOS and HPC imo. Very grateful to Profs
| Ramachandran and Vuduc
|
| AOS (and its prerequisite) gives a really strong foundation for
| working on infrastructure.
|
| HPC pushed me farther than any other class I've done, it's very
| unique, helped me land my current gig
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Is there a way to do the actual degree in double the speed /
| self-paced?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-07 23:01 UTC)