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Ask HN: Does a supervisor/university matter for a Masters in CS

4 pointssolo7546 comments

So I am in a bit of a peculiar situation and thought I might ask. A few years back, I made a career change to get into CS and ended up doing a diploma. While on the diploma I got a full-time job as a coder. Now, I don't want to quit my job and I'd like to do a Master's degree (towards ML\NLP). I have a supervisor but he is not very well known in the field. Neither is the university. However he is willing to accept me as a part-time student for a thesis project. Is this a good approach or should I consider other options (such as doing course-based masters) ?

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A CS degree doesn't fully train you to be a coder, and coder training doesn't prep you for an advanced CS degree. The Java/C++/Python they taught in my undergrad CS courses, along with the homework assignments that took 30+ hours to do, are only about 30% of the level of stuff you'll be expected to do in a high-paying job. Most of the stuff I learned was on my own...I had expected a college CS curriculum (an Ivy nonetheless) to touch on the stuff I had self-learned but they never did.

Funny story for what it's worth: When I was in undergrad, a few friends and I launched an API service...We needed some extra help...so we put out a part-time programming internship on nearby Craigslist Manhattan (hoping to get some smart college kids since there are many colleges nearby). We actually got a resume and cover letter from our not-so-nice CS T.A. who had graduated with a masters....from a year ago.

Keep your job.

What is your end goal? If it's to be a professor, then maybe it matters a little. But the quality of your work/research matters quite a bit too.

Well, maybe sometime in the distant future. But for now it would be to find a better job.

If it's just to find a better job, then I wouldn't worry too much about the prestige factor. You will get a better job through quality of work and the ability to prove it. The prestige factors plays more into jobs in academics. Don't get me wrong, a degree from a top notch school can make a difference in finding work, but not as much as your ability to code and display your ability.

Supervisor has no meaning. University name matters if it is famous or the same one your prospective hiring manager went to.

I can agree to this. We hired someone, and we didn't know the university, looked it up and seemed fine. I got a lot of job offers myself a couple of years ago from simply applying to jobs in the same city as I went to uni in. Everyone there knew the uni and knew that it was plenty good enough.

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