OMSCS Open Courseware
sites.gatech.edu
sites.gatech.edu
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.
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.
See you around!
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?
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.
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.
Unfamiliar with us academic terms.
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]
* 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
I wasn't in any discord groups but the class discussion forum was a nice community.
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.
How do you all deal with this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t view class central as being useful, could really use much more detailed filtering of results.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
For core CS, I found Graduate Intro to Operating Systems very rewarding.
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
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.
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.
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.
DSI (6422) is taught by Andy Pavlo’s first PhD student who help to create the CMU course and a rather famous DB person. It is the same contents as the on-campus course (and were actually working to deepen/increase the depth of coverage). It’s designed to bridge between DB Theory and reading Postgres or MySql source code when it comes to DB designs and trade-offs — and covers topics like r-tries which I don’t think is covered elsewhere + a series of 12 seminal DB papers. As in any other grad-level class, you get out as much as you put in — and it’s super rare to have access to a DB researcher like Joy or hear his takes on DB development as a student at scale.
If anything, the feedback we’ve gotten from both on campus undergrad and MS students is that the OMSCS lectures + improvements are making their session more rigorous.
The reviews are rather outdated..
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.
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.
Here is a tip: maybe don't assume so much!
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.
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.