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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

All non-thesis CS master degrees are a bit suspect. They are basically a few more courses, usually at night for professional students, but increasingly online. I'm not really sure what kind of value they add beyond looking good on a resume.

Thesis masters are increasingly rare these days as American schools allow you to jump straight to a PhD program (Europe is a bit more rigid here). The other kind of Masters degree that is increasingly popular is the 5th year undergrad extension, which makes a lot of a sense (MIT started the trend here, other schools have followed).

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I've spent a lot of time interviewing data scientists for an entry-level position lately, and it's pretty shocking to hear them describe their master's "capstone project", which often consists of a group project with some pre-cleaned data. A few calls to sklearn later, bam, an M.S.

Seems that all schools added a "data science" specialization a few years ago, but of course they can't suddenly become good at it if they haven't done it before.

My master in a no-name French tech school was mostly a software development curriculum, with some DL and scikit-learn courses tacked on. That was for the paper, the actual skills came on the job and online.

France has great engineering schools that are very math focused.

Anyone with a French engineering diploma I would consider for a data science position.

I'm glad we have that reputation. :)

Why does a 5th year undergrad extension make sense but not a non-thesis masters? They are effectively the same thing right? Additional classes?

You get a lot of value out of a 4 year undergrad degree, much more than a masters. So just building on that degree immediately with more intense course work and some independent thesis project seems like a win to me. I would have loved to have had an extra year on my undergrad degree for some graduate-level courses and independent project time.

I can only speak for MIT, but its 5th year Masters of Engineering program does require a thesis[1]. It makes sense for a lot of students at MIT since many undergrads take graduate-level classes anyway (since they can also fulfill undergrad requirements and are often more interesting anyway) so it's only slightly more effort to do the thesis and get the Masters.

In my own personal experience, I was already done with the graduate class requirement after my 4th year, so I only had to concentrate on doing the thesis during the 5th year (though I also enrolled in a couple electives of my own choosing). For me, that year was relatively more chill than my previous years.

[1] https://www.eecs.mit.edu/academics/undergraduate-programs/me...

During the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash there were even tech support jobs asking for a masters degree. This has basically gone away with the tight STEM labor market. But it was one of the reasons I wound up getting a BS in IT instead of going straight from grade school to tech support.

> I'm not really sure what kind of value they add beyond looking good on a resume.

To me it adds negative value. And I'm not the only one [0]. Especially when the undergrad was from a weak school or something unrelated to CS.

[0] https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-compu...

The MIT 5th year masters program for EECS requires a thesis and for you to find a faculty thesis advisor that is separate from your academic advisor.

Ya, I forgot that point. But it is usually one semester of classes + one semester of writing a thesis (not sure what MIT does these days, I think this is what UCLA does), which isn't the usual one year of courses + one year of thesis writing.

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