I had been working in civil service for the US Navy for about 10 years in operations research & systems engineering. It was very hard to break out of that role to any private industry—especially for the ML roles I wanted, which I think was partially because my undergrad degree was MechEng.

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.