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.
Graduated 5 years ago. One of the best decisions in life. Coursework is challenging and more than 2 classes would definitely feel like a very full time degree (1 per semester is the best pace imo for work life study balance). Although you would need special permission to take a third class (from what I remember).
My resume is also looked at differently after mentioning Georgia Tech. It really helped gain a lot of confidence. Fundamentally changed things as my undergraduate in India was not a good experience for me.
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.
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.
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.
I eyed this program last year but resigned my desires because I didn't think I'd be able to juggle it.
Would you say that a 1 class/semester pace is too much for someone with a full time job, two littles < 3 years, and a spouse that expects a nonzero amount of interaction?
The program is quite intensive, so you'd have to be thoughtful selecting courses, and potentially making some trade-offs -- negotiate some weekends off with your spouse, use vacation days for studying, etc.
I have a demanding full time job, frequent travel for work, and two kids (although they're older, so not as time consuming as in your case). At times it has been tough to juggle (inc many late nights), but doable so far.
The workload goes anywhere from 8-10h/week per class for the easiest courses, to north of 25-30h+ for the hardest ones (GA, ML). Of course YMMV, depending on your background on each topic. Also, some classes are front loaded and release all projects early, so you can pace yourself. Others (I'd guess the majority) are released as you go, and you need to keep up with the schedule.
Another approach I use is to take advantage of the break between semesters to study the content in advance. This way I have some buffer when I need to travel for work, etc.
Feel free to drop me a note if you want to chat more. Email in my profile.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember reading this when you published it! I was considering going at the time, as well as some years after, but this + work + starting a family had me choose different. I don't know if you've written a follow-up, but I would 100% read that.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
> 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.
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???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OMSCS student here. You are absolutely right that the DB course is one of the weaker offerings. There is a newer Database System Implementation course, which is based on Andy Pavlo's excellent undergrad course (which is also available online), but only the first half or so of that course is covered, which is disappointing for a graduate course. In terms of the larger program, however, the two database courses are outliers and most courses are of much higher quality and definitely not undergrad level.
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.
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.
Graduated 5 years ago. One of the best decisions in life. Coursework is challenging and more than 2 classes would definitely feel like a very full time degree (1 per semester is the best pace imo for work life study balance). Although you would need special permission to take a third class (from what I remember).
My resume is also looked at differently after mentioning Georgia Tech. It really helped gain a lot of confidence. Fundamentally changed things as my undergraduate in India was not a good experience for me.
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.
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
You can download the lectures from many of the courses, but not all, from the site.
What does "three down, seven to go" mean?
Unfamiliar with us academic terms.
The program requires 10 courses to graduate. The parent comment has completed 3 courses and has 7 courses remaining.
Got it, thanks.
You'll get there! Some of them you can take two at a time. I myself only need 3 more!
> ... 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!
I eyed this program last year but resigned my desires because I didn't think I'd be able to juggle it.
Would you say that a 1 class/semester pace is too much for someone with a full time job, two littles < 3 years, and a spouse that expects a nonzero amount of interaction?
The program is quite intensive, so you'd have to be thoughtful selecting courses, and potentially making some trade-offs -- negotiate some weekends off with your spouse, use vacation days for studying, etc.
I have a demanding full time job, frequent travel for work, and two kids (although they're older, so not as time consuming as in your case). At times it has been tough to juggle (inc many late nights), but doable so far.
The workload goes anywhere from 8-10h/week per class for the easiest courses, to north of 25-30h+ for the hardest ones (GA, ML). Of course YMMV, depending on your background on each topic. Also, some classes are front loaded and release all projects early, so you can pace yourself. Others (I'd guess the majority) are released as you go, and you need to keep up with the schedule.
Another approach I use is to take advantage of the break between semesters to study the content in advance. This way I have some buffer when I need to travel for work, etc.
Feel free to drop me a note if you want to chat more. Email in my profile.
Thank you. This was insightful. I probably don't have the time now, but maybe I can revisit the decision in a few years once the kids are a bit older.
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]
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
ffmpeg
This is how I've done it. Some courses have short lectures from 30s to 2.5min which can be annoying
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.
I remember reading this when you published it! I was considering going at the time, as well as some years after, but this + work + starting a family had me choose different. I don't know if you've written a follow-up, but I would 100% read that.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They don't even require the GRE. They have a very high acceptance rate but a pretty low completion rate.
Last time I heard (like 3 years ago), the acceptance rate was 80%. The completion rate is much lower.
I got two letters from managers at work and one from a friend who I work with.
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.
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.
That’s counterintuitive. If COVID couldn’t bring in business, what could?
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.
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)"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate more on continuing with research?
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.
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.
I was also in the first cohort. Graduated in 2016. Transformed my career. 100% would recommend.
Oh boy, love to hear that. Would be willing to share how exactly it transformed your career?
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.
Your story is an inspiration. Thank you for posting, I've applied for the next cohort in Autumn.
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.
Best of luck! I hope it’s as amazing for you as it was for me.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for sharing that! I still have a lot of time to think about enrolling thankfully.
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.
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
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.)
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.
Is a masters of really holding anyone back once you have a couple years of experience?
I just enjoy school, nothing is holding me back.
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).
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
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).
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.
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.
is there a decent list of omscs courses to avoid on this basis?
Very cool, thanks for posting this. I've had a number of colleagues try to level up through programs like this with mixed outcomes.
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.
What do you mean? https://omscs.gatech.edu/admission-criteria
Thanks. Don't know how I missed it.
Is there a way to do the actual degree in double the speed / self-paced?
Has anyone tried the courses in the ML or core CS areas? What'd you think?
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. It is. Your database course was apparently broken.
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.
OMSCS student here. You are absolutely right that the DB course is one of the weaker offerings. There is a newer Database System Implementation course, which is based on Andy Pavlo's excellent undergrad course (which is also available online), but only the first half or so of that course is covered, which is disappointing for a graduate course. In terms of the larger program, however, the two database courses are outliers and most courses are of much higher quality and definitely not undergrad level.
DB is known to be a weaker offering.
https://www.omscentral.com/
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.
I am not sure what your point is. Is it that no CS is valuable or that only certain CS degrees are valuable?