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OMSCS Open Courseware
- dannyfreeman 10mo agoI would like to get my masters from georgia tech's omscs program but between work and 2 kids I dont see how I'll ever have the time
- marai2 10mo agoOne course per semester might be doable? Not sure how frequently the assignments are due because you could probably carve out some time over the weekends.
- dannyfreeman 10mo agoYeah, thinking about waiting until both the kids themselves are in school and then 1 course a semester for me. Not sure if that will be easier or harder than doing it while they are young
- BlackjackCF 10mo agoOMSCS grad here. The awesome thing about the program is its flexibility. Some of the courses are definitely more time intensive, but I think if you took only one class and dedicated about an hour a day to the course materials, you'd be in good shape. (I know that's still a lot to ask of someone with two young kids.)
- krapht 10mo agoThere's no way to get through the harder courses in the program on 1 hour a day. And you're not getting value from the degree if you aren't pushing yourself to take those hard courses, unless you just need the diploma.
- tayo42 10mo agoIs a masters of really holding anyone back once you have a couple years of experience?
- dannyfreeman 10mo agoI just enjoy school, nothing is holding me back.
- rahimnathwani 10mo agoThere's a web site where different people share what they think of each course, and how many hours they devote per week: https://www.omscentral.com/ https://www.omscentral.com/ That might help you decide whether it's doable. My first (and only) course was somewhere in the middle in terms of effort, and the courses I was most interested would have required another 50% on top, which wasn't going to work for me, between work, parenting, other learning etc.
- rootusrootus 10mo agoI did it with two kids (both were in school at that point, which helps). It -is- a lot of work. I spent maybe an hour a day during most days of the week, and then for some things I'd try to get a few more hours early or late in the day on the weekend. And for the most part I only did one class per semester. I did two for one semester because they were both expected to be fairly easy, and that worked out, but I definitely wouldn't do that with GA or any of the ML stuff. It's doable, that's all I'm saying. But you will definitely need to be committed to see it through to the end, and you will be happy to have your life back when you're done.
- dannyfreeman 10mo agoThanks for sharing that! I still have a lot of time to think about enrolling thankfully.
- ludwik 10mo agoAs a childless OMSCS graduate, I also can’t imagine doing it while having kids, because it took basically all of my free time. That said, I met quite a few people in the program who were in situations similar to yours. I have no idea how they managed it, but they somehow did.
- hasyimibhar 10mo agoI completed OMSCS with 2 kids (both preschool), taking 1 class per semester from Fall 2019 to Spring 2023. It was possible thanks to having full remote job and a very supportive wife. I learned a lot, but I probably wouldn't do it again, it was extremely unhealthy, especially for certain classes like Distributed Computing (CS7210).
- Jesus_piece 10mo agoWhy was it extremely unhealthy? The work load? The lack of sleep with work, kids, and school? Asking because I’m sorta in the same position
- legerdemain 10mo agoSpecifically CS7210 is demanding because of its assignments. The assignments come from UW's CSE452, have very little direct connection with the course lectures, and require you to implement a Paxos-like system correctly, basically in one shot, in an environment that is very difficult to debug. So the projects turn into 60-80-hour slogs where students change parameters semi-randomly until something starts working. CS7210 shares that aspect with a number of other courses in the program.
- kingkongjaffa 10mo agois there a decent list of omscs courses to avoid on this basis?
- hasyimibhar 10mo agoMostly lack of sleep and having to sacrifice a lot of weekends to work on the assignments. I took OMSCS with the goal of learning as much as possible since I did not have a traditional CS degree, so I took all the hard classes in the Computing Systems track (DC, Compilers, ISL:BE, IHPC, etc). CS7210 (DC) is the hardest class I took. We had to write a correct Paxos implementation, then use it to build a distributed sharded KV store. I remember having to spend 10+ hours on a single day during weekend. It was worth it though, learned a lot about distributed consensus, and how difficult it is to get right (there were test failures that were fixed after hours of debug, and the fix was literally changing the order of some code lol).
- kimgatech 10mo agoOMSCentral is no longer maintained and new classes won’t be there. OMSHub.org is probably a better bet
- rahimnathwani 10mo agoOMSCS requires ten courses to graduate. I completed one course (with an A grade) before realizing that, even at a pace of one course per semester, it was not a high enough priority for me to devote the time required to do each course well. That course was great, though, and I definitely learned some things I'm glad to have learned! IMO the instructional materials are a small part of the value. The things that stood out to me were: - the assignments - the autograding of programming assignments - giving and receiving peer feedback about written assignments - learning some LaTeX for those assignments - having an artificial reason (course grade) to persist in improving my algorithm and code [on the problems taught in that course, I wouldn't have been self-motivated enough if they were just things I came across during a random weekend]
- lumost 10mo agoThe ability of OMSCS to scale paper writing, review, and grading with real human TAs is nothing short of astounding. While it's a ton of work (I'm just completing class #5) it's a great resource for both learning the material - and how to communicate it effectively.
- BlackjackCF 10mo agoThings that I loved about the program: * My fellow classmates. Had a small study group where we got on Discord to hang out and it was a blast * The TAs - they were so dedicated to the students and fantastic. MVPs of the program
- rahimnathwani 10mo agoOh yeah I forgot to mention the class discussion board. I wasn't in any discord groups but the class discussion forum was a nice community.
- mgrat 10mo agoVery cool, thanks for posting this. I've had a number of colleagues try to level up through programs like this with mixed outcomes.
- loph 10mo agoI have taken three of those classes as part of the Online Master of Cybersecurity program. They were all excellent. I can say that the assignments were an important part of the learning experience, for instance the practical experience of attacking weak RSA keys. I would not let the lack of assignments, tests, and quizzes stop you from trying these if you are interested. At a minimum, they would give you a feeling for what the program/s are like, and possibly encourage you to enroll into the online degree program, which is an exceptional value.
- legerdemain 10mo agoHas anyone tried the courses in the ML or core CS areas? What'd you think?
- ssnola504 10mo agoThe ML course is interesting. Some of the lectures are a bit chatty and the official course text book was written in 1997, but it’s a great survey of many different ML models, including Neural Networks. It’s a good segue into Deep Learning where you explore more advanced NN architectures, beyond Feed-Forward NNs. For core CS, I found Graduate Intro to Operating Systems very rewarding.
- photochemsyn 10mo agoI really can't imagine that these online degrees have any real value in the modern world of LLM-assited coding - there's no way anyone looking at a resume would think such institutional online degrees still have any value. Perhaps there is some educational value for the student, but even there the only real value is the organizational structure - you might as well form an online study group on discord for free, and get the same learning benefit, just have an LLM write up the syllabus for a course based on a good textbook, no instructor overhead needed.
- xbar 10mo agoI am not sure what your point is. Is it that no CS is valuable or that only certain CS degrees are valuable?
- mym1990 10mo agoThe OMSCS degree you get is equivalent to the in person one, so there is no way to make the distinction in an interview. I actually don’t see how people see that an experience like this brings no value, given the rigor of the assignments. One certainly would come out with a better knowledge of how things work, develop a better work ethic, and hopefully make some network connections on the way…
- coolThingsFirst 10mo agoThis is very debatable. The courses look like they were recorded in the 90s. The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a tutorial not a university course. If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.
- __loam 10mo agoDB is known to be a weaker offering. https://www.omscentral.com/ https://www.omscentral.com/
- grantgallagher 10mo agoI’m an OMSCS grad - the dedication to making higher education in CS more accessible is something that really sticks out to me from those in charge (shoutout to Dr. Joyner who heads the program). Although not every course is on the Open Courseware (nor course work), there’s still a lot of good material, and if you like it enough, the program is a nice little side quest in ones journey through computer science.
- zero-sharp 10mo agoHi is there a way to view the lectures in a more traditional way? For example, as one long video? I'm seeing lessons broken up into 2-5 minute long videos.
- bubblethink 10mo agoffmpeg
- jay3ss 10mo agoThis is how I've done it. Some courses have short lectures from 30s to 2.5min which can be annoying
- analog31 10mo agoI didn't quickly find the entrance requirements for the OMSCS program and the other similar programs. I know someone who has an undergraduate arts degree and is learning programming and CS voraciously, but not in any organized fashion.
- __loam 10mo agoAOS destroyed me lol. Video Game Design is excellent. Graduate algo is a requirement for everyone and has great lectures if you're looking for an introductory course.
- warabe 10mo agoI once considered applying, but I gave up because collecting letters of recommendation was a major hurdle. My academic advisor from university has already retired… How do you all deal with this?
- thisoneisreal 10mo agoI hit the same roadblock unfortunately. My academic references were all in a different field and I hadn't really stayed in contact except with one professor, who sadly has died. I did see that there's an option to use professional references, so even though I haven't done this myself, one route you could consider taking is to get references from managers, colleagues etc. who can speak to your technical knowledge. I agree though with your general point that after being out of an academic environment for a while that requirement becomes challenging.
- great_wubwub 10mo agoI have not applied to this program but I've gone through a part-time MBA. I doubt that an online program for working professionals is as rigorous about references as, say, undergrad admission to an Ivy League program or Oxford or Hogwarts or something. Just get a couple of coworkers with a similar advanced degree to write something that says "this person exists and I think they can handle the load" and you'll be fine. Remember that college is a business; if you look like you can both handle the program and pay for it, they'll let you in.
- rootusrootus 10mo agoUnless something has changed recently, the letters of recommendation are pretty much a formality. If you have a bachelor's in CS with decent grades, getting admitted isn't difficult. I was pretty flippant about the whole thing, applied one afternoon on a whim after reading about it on HN. Asked my manager for a letter of recommendation as well as my nearest colleague. No letters from anyone in academia. I think the people who have the most difficulty getting accepted are those without a bachelor's in CS who also don't have some good CS fundamentals courses to show achievement and interest. I did complete the program, and I am happy for the accomplishment. But with my experience (I started working in the mid 90s) this wasn't for my career, it was for my own satisfaction. But in addition to being glad for the achievement, I was soooo glad to be done, LOL. The real commitment is not financial, it is time.
- oaxacaoaxaca 10mo agoI was in the very first cohort of this program. I loved it but had to drop for personal/family reasons after finishing three courses. Someday I'd love to jump back in! I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested.
- cgearhart 10mo agoI was also in the first cohort. Graduated in 2016. Transformed my career. 100% would recommend.
- oaxacaoaxaca 10mo agoOh boy, love to hear that. Would be willing to share how exactly it transformed your career?
- cgearhart 10mo agoI had been working in civil service for the US Navy for about 10 years in operations research & systems engineering. It was very hard to break out of that role to any private industry—especially for the ML roles I wanted, which I think was partially because my undergrad degree was MechEng. OMSCS allowed me to add MSCS to my resume, with additional networking and work experience details as a TA for the algorithms and Computational Photography courses. Suddenly I started getting a lot more calls back. About 6 months after graduation I had moved to the SFBay (to work for Udacity) and within 2 years I was an ML engineer at Apple where I remain today. I don’t think any of that would’ve happened without OMSCS.
- oaxacaoaxaca 10mo agoWhoa! Incredible! Talk about a OMSCS success story. Thank you for sharing – this is seriously going to serve as motivation fuel for me to get back into it.
- cgearhart 10mo ago
- guiambros 10mo agoCurrent OMSCS grad student; three down, seven to go. Loving the program so far. The content is great, and most of it is available on Open Courseware, YT, etc, but here's what else you get by officially going through the program: - the amazing community of TAs - the assignments - the feedback on reports & projects (either automated, or through TAs) - the collaboration with other students on Ed, Discord, Slack, etc - the forcing function of deadlines, having to study for exams, etc - free access to academic libraries, IEEE, ACM, O'Reilly, etc - access to software and services, educational packages from GitHub, Wolfram, Google Colab Pro, student discount in a bunch of places, etc Another underrated aspect is GT's ability to preserve rigor of the program overall, despite the scale and number of students in some courses (the most popular ones have 1,000-1,500 students per semester). If you're on the fence on applying, I strongly recommend you do. The program is affordable enough that there's no harm in trying for a few semesters to see if matches what you're looking for. Glad to answer any questions.
- zero-sharp 10mo agoIn reference to the open courseware, is there a way to either just download all of the videos in bulk, or view them as part of a single video? It looks like they're broken down into ~2 minute long video clips through the Ed platform, which is very annoying.
- jay3ss 10mo agoYou can download the lectures from many of the courses, but not all, from the site.
- guiambros 10mo agoAnnoying indeed. I created a script using ffmpeg to merge all the 2-min clips into a longer video per chapter[1], so I could watch the lectures on my commute. You may need to tweak for different courses, but I've used for ML4T, GIOS, and ML, and it has been incredibly helpful. [1] https://github.com/guiambros/vidcat https://github.com/guiambros/vidcat
- rdudek 10mo ago
- rs186 10mo agoIn the past they made videos available via Udacity, which were removed after Udacity turned their focus to short & easy (which often means superficial) courses for enterprise training instead of "serious" university courses. I guess that was not a viable business. Of course they did not come with any assignments, just like these courses. Can't blame them, but other universities offer much resources -- for the same topic, you can often find a course offered by another university that provides videos hosted on YouTube, full assignments and labs, even exams. The only thing you are missing is TA/office hours and the course credit. In other words, unless you actually want to earn credits and work towards a degree, I suggest that you skip OMSCS videos unless there is no alternative.
- storus 10mo agoUdacity recently released their own MS AI though with shaky accreditation via Malta's MFHEA which was recently rejected by EQAR, making it unaccredited abroad.
- cgearhart 10mo agoI was the head of enterprise curriculum in 2018 and an OMSCS grad in 2016. This was a weird time to work for Udacity and the company went thru a major shakeup in 2019. The “breakup” with GT happened before the focus on enterprise and the enterprise focus was somewhat short-lived as the CEO was replaced just as enterprise was ascending as the primary revenue stream. COVID was rough for Udacity, and content production was commoditized.
- justin66 10mo agoThat’s counterintuitive. If COVID couldn’t bring in business, what could?
- rs186 10mo agoI imagine what it means is basically, "Before COVID, universities had to collaborate with Udacity to produce these courses and manage course credits/online degrees. Now they realized that they can easily do it themselves (perhaps at the institution level)"
- storus 10mo agoUTexas seems to be crushing it in the ML/AI space as they offer far more recent courses with deeper topics; for everything else OMSCS is probably a better choice even though it has a relentless pace of busywork making even easy classes draining. Stanford OTOH is like GT and UT merged together (both crazy difficult projects and a lot of math), but at 2x the pace. UT is way more relaxing than either, one can take 3 courses alongside a job and be fine, which is next to impossible at GT and Stanford. Conversely, if one wants to continue by doing research, Stanford and GT are much more useful due to ample opportunities to do so.
- sanufar 10mo agoCould you elaborate more on continuing with research?
- storus 10mo agoGT used to have a collaboration with Meta's FAIR and one could do final projects in the DL and NLP classes on recent research topics from Meta AI; some people ended up at top conferences with their work. Not sure how it's going to be now given Meta effectively disbanding FAIR in favor of Wang's Superintelligence. GT also has team research project under VIP (Vertically Integrated Projects) where a prof leads a team of students towards new findings; there are also a bunch of PhD seminars one can take. Stanford has a plenty of CS3xx research classes one can take where the final project has to be some novel research.
- LTL_FTC 10mo agoI have been considering the OMSCS program for some time but one of my reservations is the network one misses out on by working side by side with students and faculty vs online ed. For context: non-traditional student who transferred to UCSD for college, two of those years were spent during Covid. Moved back to Bay Area. My network isn’t as big as someone who maybe went to San Jose state. And so they prob have an easier time finding jobs. I worked with other students through discord and so on, attended virtual office hours with professors and TAs (who were the reason many of us passed these classes, I’m sure) but never truly built a relationship that lasted beyond the quarter because zoom, essentially. And if I go back to grad school, I would really love to build relationships with others around me. Wondering how others have managed with this regard?
- schneems 10mo agoI wrote about my experiences in OMSCS here https://schneems.com/2017/07/26/omscs-omg-is-an-online-masters-right-for-you/ https://schneems.com/2017/07/26/omscs-omg-is-an-online-maste.... It took about 7 years, but I finally got my degree.
- robertwpearce 10mo agoI remember reading this when you published it! I was considering going at the time, as well as some years after, but this + work + starting a family had me choose different. I don't know if you've written a follow-up, but I would 100% read that.
- bayareapsycho 10mo agoThis program was so good, I was most of the way through it before it managed to help me land a better job. But now I have no idea if I'll ever finish it because it's pretty time consuming The best two classes are AOS and HPC imo. Very grateful to Profs Ramachandran and Vuduc AOS (and its prerequisite) gives a really strong foundation for working on infrastructure. HPC pushed me farther than any other class I've done, it's very unique, helped me land my current gig
- jbverschoor 10mo agoIs there a way to do the actual degree in double the speed / self-paced?