Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OMSCS Open Courseware

sites.gatech.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 106 posts

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#31

Post by great_wubwub »

warabe wrote: post #28

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?

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#32

Post by StefanBatory »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #20
mym1990 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#33

Post by rootusrootus »

warabe wrote: post #28

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?

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#34

Post by rootusrootus »

dannyfreeman wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#35

Post by dqg82 »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #20
mym1990 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#36

Post by ludwik »

dannyfreeman wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#37

Post by linguae »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #20
mym1990 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#38

Post by Jtsummers »

warabe wrote: post #28

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#39

Post by guiambros »

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.

Re: OMSCS Open Courseware

#40

Post by rs186 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #7

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 g…

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.
Post reply on HN