This: I had the same opportunity, and help with the tuition. All in all this was challenging but a good experience. Then the question is was it worth it? I thin

This: I had the same opportunity, and help with the tuition. All in all this was challenging but a good experience. Then the question is was it worth it? I think it depends: I had a mostly outstanding set of instructors and took a lot of graduate seminar classes where there was a lot of great class discussion among curious and experienced folk. I enjoyed that a lot. I might be able to get this elsewhere, but I suspect it's rare. For the more project-based classes the structure and added motivation was nice and the instruction again helped make the learning process more efficient, but you could, in theory do that yourself too. --- edit: Another thing is that I had a chance to dip my toes a bit into doing research without being in the PhD long haul. This was also very satisfying: reading papers is no longer intimidating and ended up being very helpful in my area (databases / systems). Re: classes, yes the basic curricula always seems repetitive for folks who took a CS undergrad, but it's up to you to convince your advisor or graduation committee or whatever that you can and should skip basic requirements and instead tailor your major to more advanced stuff that you want to do.