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Ask HN: Switching schools to Georgia Tech worth it?
I am considering leaving my current Masters of CS program at a lower ranking school to attend GT OMSCS.
How important is a degree from a top CS school in regards to getting a job at a FAANG company?
Should I just stay at my current school and practice leetcode every day until I graduate instead?
My bachelors and work experience are not relevant.
- jki275 6y agoGA Tech will be cheaper, having GA Tech on your resumé is a net positive in a job search. Beyond that, you're going to be starting over, and frankly the GA Tech experience isn't very good in any way -- speaking as a student that's half way through the program.
- paat 6y agoI am aware of that. I have been reading about what the courses are like on the reddit and quite frankly it sounds like hell to me. I am mostly interested in security, and not so interested in AI/ML. Robotics does sound pretty cool though.
- jki275 6y agoAI4R is a phenomenal course, and it's run by a couple of great professors who actually care about teaching it. ML4T is another amazing course that's run by a great professor who actually cares about teaching. Unfortunately I haven't found any other courses like those.
- kingkongjaffa 6y ago> GA Tech experience isn't very good in any way Can you elaborate? I'm a MechEng by education who has found himself in a software start up, I'm not US based but was looking for something like the GT program to help round out the resume post career switch.
- jki275 6y agoI know more than one mech e who got into the program and couldn’t handle it. It’s just straight up pain and suffering and the actual education is sub par. If you read through omscentral a lot of the reviews there are actually spot on.
- ploika 6y agoYou personally are the one who will be hired or not, not a fungible Georgia Tech Graduate (or otherwise). See if you can find out where previous graduates of your current masters ended up, and compare it to the Georgia Tech masters. If dropping out and moving on will lead to a genuine step change in your career prospects, give it serious consideration. If it will just result in more debt and more stress for broadly similar prospects (assuming you get accepted and then succeed at the new course), just focus on learning and being employable from where you are. I'm based in Europe so I don't know what the jobs market in the USA is truly like. I have to ask though, is it really that important to get a job at a FAANG company? Is it genuinely the case that you won't find interesting, fulfilling and well-paid work outside of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google? Are you even sure that you will have a great job in one of those five places? Good-but-not-top-tier universities routinely produce very good graduates with very good prospects. Boring companies have a lot of interesting problems to solve, and lots of them let you wear jeans to work too. Google has plenty of drudgery and office politics. If the companies you're aiming for will not consider you unless you went to one of a select few expensive elite universities, that's probably not a great reflection on them either.
- paat 6y agoYes, I actually already went on linkedIn and checked to see how many people from my school got jobs at FAANG companies (including Intel). There were very few, and most of them have non-engineering related bachelor's degrees. Only one of them was an engineer at google. When you look at Georgia Tech graduates on linkedIn, the opposite is true. Hence, me making this thread. Don't get me wrong though, my school does seem to be pretty decent at getting people local jobs. But that wasn't really my goal personally. I want to escape my home town.
- giantg2 6y agoIs that straight numbers or percentages? The bigger school has more people, making it more likely to have some get into FAANG. PSU is huge and some students go on to FAANG, but that wouldn't increase any individual's chances. If you go to someplace like Stanford or MIT, then maybe those names help you get in due to the prestige, but I don't think Georgia Tech is that level.
- runawaybottle 6y agoIt’s tough to give feedback because GA Tech is very selective, and about every other online program is cost prohibitive (yeah I can’t afford 10k plus per year, anyone that can is an upper tier of society competing amongst themselves, we haven’t reached open yet). The whole situation is not built on a real market yet. We are in the infancy. In other words, in the Wild West, you must make your own toil.
- logicslave 6y agoLeetcode is all that matters. Nothing else matters in this industry anymore