I'd argue that for many student from a undergraduate CS background, taking a course-based MSCS program from a top school with a specific direction can be tremen

I'd argue that for many student from a undergraduate CS background, taking a course-based MSCS program from a top school with a specific direction can be tremendously helpful to the student both professionally and personally. I did not have a specific focus in my undergraduate study in CS and I'm doing HCI+AI for my Master's, which has been min-blowing so far as I'm taking more graduate level courses and exposed to content of much greater depth than my undergraduate study. These courses are usually structured with small research projects/paper readings and I've seen many students come up with research quality work out of the project portion of the classes. For a student like me, there is also a tradeoff between during research vs doing your own side project vs taking more courses in school. Doing research can be extremely time consuming and potentially affect other course selection density and even performance. I've also seen may CS graduate students who take undergraduate level courses out of MSCS and they max-out the amount of course they can take. These are usually great courses that their previous school does not offer. Doing research in a specific area is probably the most counterintuitive for those who're taking lots of diverse courses. You can argue that these type of students are still figuring out what they want to do and that's what they should have done in their ugrads. But the truth is when you realize you can do much more, the curiosity to discover more is not that easy to stop.Doing research in summer usually is the ideal choice if the students take too many courses in other quarters and they do not want to do an intern.