Initial Thoughts on the OMSCS

Takeaways

• My initial experience as an entrant in the Online Master’s in Computer Science (OMSCS) offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology (GA TECH)
• The program is tough: expect 20 hours per course.
• For my first semester, I fully immersed myself in academic literature, project documentation, and analysis

Introduction

A shipwreck of fear. An incredible sense of hopefulness. I completed my first semester at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a candidate for the Master’s program in Computer Science. I grew up somewhere where statistically, I did not have much of a chance of escaping poverty. Few friends from high school attended or completed college. I was the first and only one in my family to achieve a bachelor’s. My father started working as a pre-teen in Mexico to support his family. The only man in a family of six sisters. My mother only years later received a GED. I am considerably thankful but have also been self-absorbed in some level of doubt. Who do I look to for advice? Was I even supposed to get this far? Maybe you feel this way too.

Here I will discuss the program itself, my initial impressions, and how I have grown since the beginning of the semester.

The Program

The Online M.S. CS (OMSCS) program offered by Ga Tech is unique in it extends the academic quality of an Ivy school to the public university system.

The winning aspect for me was the practice of accessibility of education as a principal and the resources of notable professors in each field. Various institutions try to sell students a message of leadership and impact on the world. I believe OMSCS is one of the few programs that is practicing what they preach. The diversity of the program is incredible. One semester in, and already I have had the chance to network with some incredible members of my cohort, far removed from my home state of Georgia. The bridging of education with technology is what excited me when I joined the program

My initial impressions

It is an astonishing program. Allow me to state my bias now— I wanted to go to Ga Tech as my graduate school since setting my eyes on computer science. I was fortunate to meet a Ga Tech student interning with my team when I worked as a data analyst. He helped influence me. He told me about the school and what he learned. I needed to find a program that challenged me like that. Thanks to encouragement from my mentors, I tried applying. Without a formal computer science background, I was rejected.

Devastated, I tried again. I earned additional Computer Science credits and worked to merit letters of recommendation from my professors and managers. This time I received a letter congratulating my acceptance into the program. However, there is a stipulation. Students must maintain a 3.0 GPA their first year or be automatically dropped from the program. In other words, you enter the program under academic prohibition.

While initial registration and application were hectic, especially coinciding with covid, the school did not disappoint. Although the material and discussion are entirely online, I feel like I have made as many connections as I did in undergrad with double the course load. The courses go straight to the meat and potatoes of the subject they promise to teach.

Typically, there is an assumption that a master’s program is more lenient than undergraduate programs. After all, schools are competing for YOU, not the other way around (have you heard any MBA radio ads lately?). Not the case here.

To summarize the program so far: stimulating and demanding.

Growth

I will be frank. I am a terrible writer. I wanted to get a lenient introduction to the program, so I selected some classes heavier in writing than programming to test the waters. I ended up registering for human-computer interaction and Knowledge-based AI, both taught by Professor David Joyner. Each class demanded an average of 20 hours of work every week. Reading academic literature, writing analysis, and solving problems using AI concepts ate away at any possibility of free time from my life. The biggest thing I can tell you is that my writing has improved significantly. My wife teases me all the time, “Your writing is so much better!” I have always been insecure about the way I write. It fills me with happiness. I could only achieve this because week after week, I wrote pages and pages of analysis.

On top of this, I got familiar with Georgia tech standards when it comes to programming. The lectures hinted at high-level concepts to solve problems we were assigned (in the form of mini-project and AI programs), but the environment is sink or swim. The lectures and course materials only presented high-level thinking and general algorithms but no explicit code snippets. KBAI was particularly striking because the semester-long project was an AI agent capable of perceiving images for deliberation. In summary, I was nose-deep in reading documentation from libraries like OpenCV. I will write reviews for both courses, both here and on OMSCentral.

My next semester will be this fall. I am planning on taking an operating systems class.

-Well, till next time space cowboy

Alex