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Comment by nick_kline | Hacker News Reader

Also consider getting your masters degree in CS. If your school offers it you will probably get super low tuition while working there (sounded like outside the us, must be even cheaper elsewhere). Then you will be very employable and also count for two categories in some companies that want a programmer with other skills, just like mine does.

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How can you get a master's in CS before getting a bachelor's in CS? I've got a bachelor's in mechanical but I doubt id be able to get a master's in CS with just that.

There’s plenty of programs where you don’t need a BS, you need the requirements.

It can be done. I have done it twice.

My bachelors is in electrical engineering. I got into a part-time masters course in computer engineering. Due to work pressures and travel I dropped out. Years later with several years of diverse work experience, I got into a PhD software engineering program, successfully completed that and graduated. Both experiences at two of Australia's top universities.

I believe that my key to success was writing strong proposals in both cases and handling the interviews well. And in both cases I got adjunct teaching work as well.

In your case you appear to have a strong portfolio of work and teaching experience to support any proposal you may present. Good Luck.

I think it depends on the educational system you have access to. I went to university in England, and the bachelor's degrees are 3 years long, and completely domain focused e.g you just learn computer science. So the MS degrees in that country in that country expects that material as prior knowledge.

In the US, bachelor's degrees are four years, and also include "general education" requirements. So in England, they would often expect you to do a 2nd bachelor's before doing a masters degree, whereas in the US, it would be a waste of time for you to do a second bachelor's, so instead they tend to give you "conditional" admission to the masters, but expect you to complete undergraduate (bachelor's level) CS courses before proceeding to the MS level courses. The bachelor's level courses don't "count" towards your MS, but you still have to complete them before you can start or complete the MS courses.

It sounds like you do have the opportunity to go work as a software engineer, but the pay seems too low to you. Instead, think of it like a university where they pay you :) As another person commented, the real value is the industry experience that you get, the (low) pay is just a bonus, so take it unless you actually can't survive on that for a year or so.

Even 1 year of low paid industry experience will be more valuable to you than a BS + MS in computer science in the short term. In the long-term, the skills you learn in an CS degree can be useful, but they get more useful the further along you go in your career, so better to learn them part-time as you proceed in your career.

In general, in the US if you don't have a BS, you won't be accepted to any MS program.

There's a backdoor. You get admitted into the MS for Mechanical Engineering, and then internally transfer to the CS department. Requirements are fairly low if you go that route.

Still have to have a BS. And generally transfers between MS programs aren't allowed.

The submitter has a BS, and I saw transfers between MS all the time. There's still a process and you still need to get admission, but it's much less stringent.

Sounds risky, apply for a MS that you don’t want them do a semester trying to transfer to another?

any Bachelor's degree is the requirement, not specifically a Bachelor of Science

I got a MSc in Computer Science from Bristol University (UK), having previously done a BA in History.

It's deliberately set up as a conversion course. You study an extra semester and there's a lot of work.

I often see masters in CS as a way that people from other backgrounds transition to CS. I got a bachelors in EE and then a masters in CS. Don’t worry about the piece of paper though, focus on what topics you are missing the theoretical foundations in and take classes that fill in those gaps.

I have a bachelors in finance and got into U Mich MS in CS. It's certainly doable.

You can do it but you need to talk with the head of that program to see what is involved. It might requires to take a few extra courses to fill in the gap.

The US and the rest of the Anglophone countries aren’t like Germany or other European countries where it’s impossible to difficult to do a Master’s unless you have a Bachelor’s in (almost) the same discipline. You might have to have some specific courses to get into some Master’s but what your degree was technically in isn’t that important. If you want to do GA Tech’s Online Master in CS you’ll generally need to have Algorithms and Data Structures but it’s not a hard requirement. If you have a Math or Physics degree or you’ve worked as a software engineer doing complex technical work the lack of a cognate Bachelor’s will not disqualify you. If you’ve got a completely irrelevant Bachelor’s like English or Sociology and no relevant work experience you’re probably going to have to do some CS courses as a post bac to be admitted.

Don't worry about it. I have a bachelor's in Physics, worked a few years as an engineer. I'm currently in a CS PhD. A lot of people in my department don't have CS undergrands. Several other physicists and mathematicians (lots of us work in HPC). One guy even had a bachelor's in business. I'd also say that work experience goes a long way. I kinda wished I applied to more schools, but I am really happy with where I'm at (so I got lucky). You can jump ship going into graduate school as long as you show the basic competency. I'll even say that there are a lot of people with bachelor's in CS that are shitty programmers (you'll often hear HN complain about how a degree doesn't mean you know how to program well).

So don't worry, take the shot.

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