4 ms·

I did this at Boston University (night school at MET) over 4 years. 10 total classes, they do 3 semesters a year, and I took 2 semesters off. Overall I liked it

I did this at Boston University (night school at MET) over 4 years. 10 total classes, they do 3 semesters a year, and I took 2 semesters off. Overall I liked it, solid program, assisted me later when the credential helped validate me to hiring managers and then later to investors. It also forced me to study deeper and become much more serious about the foundational knowledge. The most hilarious part to me was that I did my undergrad at BU and it was ~$200k total over 4 years for a CS degree pre-2010 (BU has since gone parabolic in cost and is now over $75k per year!). My entire masters at night was ~$30k from 2012-2016, and I get the same institutional signal on my resume. Why? Grad students taking night classes have to typically pay out of pocket, and want value for their money. Undergraduates, especially the enormous quantity of non-STEM majors, are not thinking rationally and take out huge debt for an experience.[0][1] This colors my opinion on why the government should not guarantee unlimited undergraduate debt - the cost problem would be solved overnight if students had to actually pay their way. [0] BU has an indoor lazy river that they try very hard to de-emphasize and keep images off the internet of. However it does exist as a "recreation pool" https://legitcampus.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/hey-boston-university-is-this-lazy-river-legit/ https://legitcampus.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/hey-boston-univ... [1] BU is a school full of rich foreigners and trust funders. When I graduated (granted it was shortly after the iPhone was invented) the total number of CS students graduating out of a total class of almost 4000 students was 30! 30 whole CS majors out of 4000! The communications school was something like 1000 students. CS classes were in the basement of the math building, and the ceiling was falling down, pipes were banging, and I'm positive asbestos was rampant. A rich donor has now funded a new enormous CS building, but the capital cost will continue to add onto BU's enormous tuition as it expands ever further into Kenmore and Brookline https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/update-on-bus-center-for-computing-data-sciences/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/update-on-bus-center-for-co...

anduru_h 5y ago
I was under the impression that the masters classes were designed to be a cash cow for institutions!
- yitianjian 5y ago
  Full time masters especially with international students are definitely cash cows
dls2016 5y ago
That lazy river is wild!
- warner25 5y ago
  Honestly, the lazy river sounds a lot more opulent than it really is. I remember all the hype and jokes about it when the university announced its construction, and then the letdown upon seeing it in person. It was much smaller than I imagined, and it's tucked away in a back room with almost no natural light. It's next to a small pool (separate from the big competition pool) which I used a bit, and I hardly ever saw anyone using the lazy river while there.
warner25 5y ago
It sounds like our undergraduate years in the BU CS department overlapped. I, too, have been stunned by the growth of the CS department since those days; going from the basement of 111 Cummington, as you described, to what will be one of the most iconic buildings in the city. I heard good things from a friend about the MET CS master's program too. He said that his Theory of Computation class in that program made a lot more sense than the required undergraduate Theory of Computation class with Leonid Levin, haha. But about the size of the graduating class: When we declared CS as our major in the mid-2000s, that was a historic low point for CS enrollment at all American universities, not just at BU. It's my understanding that CS departments boomed in the late 1990s, but then conventional wisdom after the Dot Com crash was that majoring in CS was a bad idea, so enrollment plummeted. I suspect that the market and compensation for software developers might still reflect this period of over-correction today. Basically, there are relatively few folks in their mid/late 30s today with a CS degree.
- seibelj 5y ago
  Leonid Levin (of the Cook Levin Theorem) was my undergraduate advisor. A very peculiar man, someone who became academic famous, and seemingly only cared about research which made his teaching an after thought. A true character.
  - warner25 5y ago
    Yes. I love his personal web page, and love that as recently as 2017 it still had the absurd neon green background. https://web.archive.org/web/20170606174105/https://www.cs.bu.edu/~lnd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170606174105/https://www.cs.bu...

anduru_h 5y ago

I was under the impression that the masters classes were designed to be a cash cow for institutions!

yitianjian 5y ago
Full time masters especially with international students are definitely cash cows

dls2016 5y ago

That lazy river is wild!

warner25 5y ago
Honestly, the lazy river sounds a lot more opulent than it really is. I remember all the hype and jokes about it when the university announced its construction, and then the letdown upon seeing it in person. It was much smaller than I imagined, and it's tucked away in a back room with almost no natural light. It's next to a small pool (separate from the big competition pool) which I used a bit, and I hardly ever saw anyone using the lazy river while there.

warner25 5y ago

It sounds like our undergraduate years in the BU CS department overlapped. I, too, have been stunned by the growth of the CS department since those days; going from the basement of 111 Cummington, as you described, to what will be one of the most iconic buildings in the city. I heard good things from a friend about the MET CS master's program too. He said that his Theory of Computation class in that program made a lot more sense than the required undergraduate Theory of Computation class with Leonid Levin, haha. But about the size of the graduating class: When we declared CS as our major in the mid-2000s, that was a historic low point for CS enrollment at all American universities, not just at BU. It's my understanding that CS departments boomed in the late 1990s, but then conventional wisdom after the Dot Com crash was that majoring in CS was a bad idea, so enrollment plummeted. I suspect that the market and compensation for software developers might still reflect this period of over-correction today. Basically, there are relatively few folks in their mid/late 30s today with a CS degree.

seibelj 5y ago
Leonid Levin (of the Cook Levin Theorem) was my undergraduate advisor. A very peculiar man, someone who became academic famous, and seemingly only cared about research which made his teaching an after thought. A true character.
- warner25 5y ago
  Yes. I love his personal web page, and love that as recently as 2017 it still had the absurd neon green background. https://web.archive.org/web/20170606174105/https://www.cs.bu.edu/~lnd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170606174105/https://www.cs.bu...