I recently completed an online Master’s in Computer Science from Georgia Tech (known as OMSCS).
I get asked a lot whether I recommend it, and I’m never really sure how to answer, so I thought I’d list a few pros and cons of the degree.
Before we get to that though, let talk through some of the details of how the degree is actually done online.
Each course consists of video lectures that you watch on your own time. You will likely get a few homeworks that might consist of some simple questions, a few solo projects that might keep you up late at night and eat up your weekends, and then some of the courses have exams (for which you will be videoed at home using your webcam).
This degree is a solo endeavor.
You will watch video lectures alone, do projects alone, and struggle (mostly) alone. Each course does have a Piazza forum associated with it where students are encouraged to discuss the material, but it is a very different experience from an in-person program.
Reasons you should take the program
You can shoot for better jobs
I was recently chatting to someone on LinkedIn who had passed through the interview stage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and was looking to be matched with a team that was hiring junior engineers.
I looked at his profile and it looked to me like he should come in at a mid-level position. However he said the recruiter told him that with only a few years of experience and no tech degree he could only come in as a junior.
So that’s your first advantage of the OMSCS. It could bump you up a level when you go on interviews. And at a place like AWS, that could be an annual difference in compensation of around $70k.
The opportunity cost is low
The financial cost of Georgia Tech’s OMSCS is very low (by American standards), coming in at around $8k as of 2020.
This all depends on how many courses you take per semester (it’s even cheaper if you load up on courses each term), but any way you slice it, you’re getting a pretty decent bang for your buck.
And because the expectation is that most people do it part time, you’re not giving up your earnings from your current position – maybe your current employer will even pay for it!
So ask yourself this – how else are you going to spend your evenings and weekends over the next 3 years? If you’re not super busy right now, it could be a good investment of your time (trust me – it goes quickly).
You’re going to learn some stuff
I love learning things. I normally spend my weekends going through books on O’Reilly, or going through a nanodegree on Udacity. Unfortunately, I often leave these endeavors unfinished.
This is what’s good about the OMSCS. It will make you sit down and study the material until you finish the course. Often it’s stuff that I know I should learn, but I’m not that interested in (like networking). Sometimes it’s material that I’m excited about (like deep learning). Either way, because it’s a degree I’m motivated to make sacrifices to finish it.
Reasons you should learn somewhere else
The quality is mixed
My experience was that the difficulty and quality of the courses varied a lot. All the available courses are reviewed by students at OMSCentral, and you can see that some courses are just plain bad.
“I feel the biggest issue is that her lectures are impossible to listen to, she just reads mathematical jargon at me with no explanation in layman’s terms, analogies, or real world application”
“The delivery is utter[ly] useless. The professor is literally reading slides.”
“This is by far the worst class I’ve ever taken. Its review doesn’t deserve any more words.”
“I am severely disappointed […]. Avoid at all costs “
A selection of negative reviews
Are they all this bad? No. But I would be wary that so many of the courses don’t have good ratings. In my own experience, I found most of the lectures to be of reasonable quality.
You will need to spend a lot of time looking for resources to bulk up your understanding. There are entire courses from other universities on youtube that you can watch for free, which are of higher quality (pretty much everything I’ve seen from Stanford is mind-blowingly good). But let’s be honest – you are not going to learn anything by watching videos anyway. You are going to learn by doing projects.
So are the projects worth it? Yeah, kind of. Some are comically disorganized, but most are not bad. Don’t expect much feedback on your solution. There will certainly not be any code reviews. And because they re-use the projects every semester, you will not be given any kind of guidance on what a good project looks like. You will just submit your code, and get a mark out of 100.
If you’re lucky some of the Teaching Assistants will hold office hours, but it’s pretty rare.
It won’t turn you into a ‘real engineer’
If you’re looking to do this degree because you didn’t take undergrad computer science and you feel a little left out when your buddies say they prefer Prim’s algorithm over Kruskal’s, you might be disappointed.
Being a real engineer is just about putting the reps in at work. Get yourself a book on design patterns, read a simple computer science book, and then call yourself a real engineer.
If you suffer from imposter syndrome and think this is the cure, well… there is no cure, you’re just going to have to change your mindset.
It takes around 3 years
There are two main semesters per year (Jan – May, and September – December), and a slightly shorter summer semester. If you are working full time and want to complete it as quickly as possible you can take the slacker specialization (Interactive Intelligence) and do a couple of easy courses per main semester and a single course in the summer semester (you can’t take more than one over summer). This will get you finished in two years.
More likely, you will want to do an interesting specialization (about 50% of students choose Machine Learning), which requires harder courses. I worked pretty hard for 3 years, doing one course for every semester, and then doubling up two easy courses at the end.
Whatever you do, accept that you are not going to be starting a business anytime soon, You might have to cut down on some of your hobbies, and you wife and/or kids are going to have to give you a lot more extra time at the weekends.
So… Should I do it or not?
I’m glad I did it.
I think it helped me land my current engineering job at a BigTech company.
I would probably have wasted my weekends training for Ironman triathlons.
But I just wish it could be better. And I think David Joyner (executive director of online education at Georgia Tech) is one of the guys who is doing just that. I took a couple of courses he was involved in, and it is clear he has a strong vision of what the future of education looks like.
But as of 2019 (when I graduated) there are so many challenges to online education that the program misses out on; too many to really make me recommend it more heartily.
In summary – yes, you should check out some of the free Georgia Tech lectures on Udacity, and then apply. You can take one course for around $800, and maybe your company will pay! If you like it, keep going, if not, no biggie!
If you are considering applying, or want to know anything about the OMSCS, please leave a comment. I would be happy to give you more personalized advice.