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Comment by ggorlen | Hacker News Reader

> Consider that taking 5-10 graduate courses and writing a master's level thesis or project will generally take all of your free time and a bunch of your savings over the course of two or more years. (I sure hope you're not thinking to take on debt for this!)

OMSCS graduate. The program certainly ate up most of my free time for 2.5 years, but on the other hand, the whole degree was about $8k for me and required no thesis or capstone project--just grinding through 10 classes worth of assignments and exams. Also, it was 100% online, so that flexibility frees up time.

Theoretically, if you do 1-2 easy-ish classes per semester, you can minimize the free time impact. But I was less interested in the credential and more interested in the learning experience, so I took difficult classes and worked as a TA.

Caveat: I graduated in 2021 so things may have changed since then.

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It's the same now. You can still take two hard/challenging courses together if you plan it right, though. Some courses release all the projects at the start of the semester so they're more self-paced, pair that with courses on a more rigid schedule that release one project at a time. If you stay ahead in the one class, then it's not much different than taking one at a time.

Good to know. https://www.omscentral.com/ and talking to other students helped a great deal with planning.

Two difficult classes I took together were Embedded Systems Optimization and Compilers, both taught by the same instructor and with similar concepts, so working on one helped solidify concepts in the other.

On the other hand, I took Distributed Computing during its first offering alongside Graduate Algorithms and was super overwhelmed.

Wow, I thought I was masochistic. What possessed you to take DC and GA (two of the hardest classes) together?

I took DC alone and found it manageable if you weren't a perfectionist. Compilers was the most difficult thing I've ever done, though that was mostly due to my own poor time management during phase 3 (generating the intermediate representation). I didn't complete phase 3, so most of my time during phase 4 (emitting MIPS assembly + implementing three register allocation algorithms + optimizations) was catching up.

Also, as a note, the very difficult classes like distributed computing and compilers are completely optional (though well worth it IMO). The only very difficult class that's required is graduate algorithms.

For those not familiar with OMSCS, there are some class ratings here: https://www.omscentral.com/

It was the first online cohort of DC so I didn't realize how intensely difficult it'd be. I'd taken GIOS with Ada which was gentle, so I figured DC wouldn't be significantly harder.

It was a good life experience even though I wound up sacrificing my 4.0 by a few grade points. In hindsight, had I realized how steep the curve would be for DC, I'd have pushed a bit harder to squeeze out a few more test cases, but I was pretty mentally defeated at the time and felt like I'd exhausted all of the ideas I had on the projects multiple times over.

I found DC more difficult than compilers by a wide margin because of the nondeterminism, debugging difficulty and trying to figure out what the test harness was even doing. Compilers involved writing more lines of code, but it was manageable, synchronous greenfield application design.

You don't have to take GA anymore if you choose the new specialization.

https://omscs.gatech.edu/specialization-human-computer-inter...

Neither HCI nor Interactive Intelligence require GA. In II it's one of two courses courses you get to choose between. I think a lot of people select those two specializations just to avoid it. II is also close to the ML specialization, so people who have trouble with or want to skip GA can move to it pretty easily.

Hm what's your evaluation of the program then? What did you learn, and did you learn what you wanted to learn?

I graduated this year. Great program at an incredible price, I think it was less than $7k for me after they reduced the fee. I didn't have a CS undergrad (Other stem) but was working as a software engineer and wanted to bulk up on basic knowledge with the systems track. Learned a lot of what I wanted and got sight on some weak areas. Would highly recommend the program. Hardest part was that it's actually very rigorous if you're going for As.

>OMSCS.

From the Georgia Tech online course?

I googled and answered my own question:

https://omscs.gatech.edu/

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