OMSCS is Georgia Tech’s Online Master’s Program in Computer Science. It is run fully online, generally taken up by working professionals.

I enrolled into the program in Fall Semester (September - December) of 2018 thus completing one semester at the time of writing.

Before I considered OMSCS

I originally intended to apply to on-campus programs in the US, but I ended up skipping out multiple times

Each time I kept thinking “I’m not going to procrastinate this year and apply”. I even got to the point of requesting recommendation letters but didn’t go through with the applications.

Procrastination was one thing, but the other was this reluctance I felt in doing the same thing that every single one of my peers were doing. I kept asking myself if it was really worth spending a fortune in a master’s program and quitting my job for it.

Most people apply for these programs for one reason - Entry into the US job market

It’s the easiest way to get a working visa (albeit limited) to the US. I’m aware that there are people who do these programs for the coursework, but that’s a small fraction.

While I was procrastinating on the applications, I started getting very interested in machine learning and was figuring out what’s the best way to learn more about it. Well lo and behold, people recommended doing a master’s or a PHD in machine learning. This was pretty unfortunate timing as I’d already missed the opportunity a couple of times by now.

But on the plus side, I got an idea on the coursework my peers were doing in the campus programs at various universities. I compared them to the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on machine learning. Turned out the MOOCs were covering the same topics while offering a lot more flexibility on topics I wanted. I decided that a master’s degree was not worth the time or money.

Where MOOCs are failing

While MOOCs technically covered the same topics, there were few things that I hadn’t considered. These were the drawbacks I had faced

MOOC content feels watered down

Initially all of them were seemingly good until I tried applying the things I had learned into practice. I later realized that I couldn’t transition the knowledge into applications outside of what I’d seen in the videos. There were a lot of questions that I didn’t have answers to, resulting in a lot of googling and frustration. I would expect the course to cover all the keywords that I would expect to search in the future.

Having an environment geared towards studying

MOOCs being online, it is easy to just close the browser tab and do something else. It is even easier to convince yourself that you’re understanding something just based on the progress bar shown on the MOOC page. Considering how most of them are self-paced, doing a 2 month course over 4-6 months is going to be less effective. There’s no real threat or risk of leaving a MOOC incomplete. In contrast an on-campus program is tied to massive tuition which causes you to have more skin in the game.

Assignments were simple

Most assignments are automatically graded, the questions generally leave very little room for creative approaches and mostly resort to multiple choice questions or simple code snippet completions to evaluate your understanding. They just lull you into a sense of learning, but everything is on a surface level.

Discovering OMSCS

Then I found out about OMSCS from reddit / hackernews. I hadn’t known that Georgia Tech had such a program along side its campus one. I looked up the courses and it had a good spread of machine learning courses which were exactly what I was looking for. It fit my needs perfectly of being flexible like a MOOC but had good credibility and rigor to it.

Should you apply for it?

Comparison to the on-campus program

Why you should NOT apply for OMSCS

Program Structure

OMSCS is like any other master’s program with two semesters each year with an optional summer term. You can decide on how many courses you wish to take each semester from 1 to 3 1.

Each course requires about 15-20 hours of time each week.

You must complete 10 courses in order to graduate.

There are four specializations available at the moment which are based on the courses you take up (5 towards your specialization and 5 from choice).

Course Availability

At the moment the courses available are a subset of the ones available on-campus with promises of expanading the catalogue in the future. You can find them listed here at OMSCentral along with reviews from past students.

Assignments and Exams

These vary across courses but most courses have a weekly / bi-weekly assignment deadlines, sometimes accompanied by a final exam or a project.

These assignments take a lot of effort to complete. In my experience with the two courses I’ve taken, assignments take 5-10 hours each to complete.

Application process

OMSCS application process requires

You can find more about it on the official page here

These should be fairly easy to obtain. The recommendation letters can either be from your university professors or current managers.

A modest TOEFL score of about 100 - 105 should suffice.

The general consensus seems to be about having a computer science background with a GPA of 3.0 as an indicator if you will be accepted into the program.

Deadlines

You can find the application deadlines here.

MOOCs that are definitely worth your time

I found a few of the MOOCs very Illuminating for deep learning and definitely recommend as a starting point for anyone willing to learn more about getting into the field

Conclusion

Do your research on OMSCS to figure out if it is the right program for you.

Find more information at

  1. Once admitted into the program you must complete 2 foundational courses with a grade of B or higher within the first academic year. Once you’ve met it, you can request to take 3 courses for a semester after an approval from your advisor. Otherwise the general guideline is to take 1 or 2 courses each semsester, with an option to take an additional course for summer. ↩︎