Watch this video before applying to Georgia Tech OMSCS

and this is a nice little summary of The General sentiment of students hey everyone the top comment on this post was Georgia Tech's OMS CS degree so I did some in-depth research for you guys to make this review this program is quite famous and popular primarily because it's an online CS master's degree from a top-ranked University and it only costs seven thousand dollars on top of that you don't have to take the GRE and there seems to be testimonials from people who got accepted into this program even without a related undergrad that just makes it even more appealing doesn't it so first off let me talk about what is amazing about because this program really is a great bang for the buck but let me also show you guys why this program isn't for most people and finally and with who the program would be great for let's start off by going to

the program info section of their website the omscs degree requires 30 hours which is 10 courses and students must declare specialization which depending on the specialization is 15 to 18 hours which is five to six courses and the remaining 12 to 15 hours which is four to five courses our free electives and can be any courses offered through the omscs program okay so you have to choose a specialization which are a computational perception of Robotics Computing systems Interactive Intelligence or Machinery flicking through each of them I was very impressed by the breadth and depth of the courses that are offered I've seen some master's degree programs that have these specializations but really most of the courses are the same and they just put like a specialization names have on it that is usually a buzzword like machine learning or something but that's not the case here ooh but there is a bit of fine print or more like italicized print only courses listed with bold titles are offered through the online program okay fair enough still very impressive in terms of poor selection and diversity each of these specializations do offer different courses and you have a pretty good selection for all of them you have the core class of cs6515 which is Introduction to graduate level algorithms software development process is required for interactive intelligence and AI ml is required for three quarters of the specializations while I look through some of these course syllabi and

realized something really cool as well many of the classes have all the videos freely available to the public and after watching some of these videos the quality is really great seriously I'm gonna be coming back here to go through some of these videos myself sometime in the future by the way you might be wondering why in the world are they providing you with all of these courses for free and that's because what you're really paying for in addition to the Master's Degree title is the accountability and support with homework and projects if you haven't done a degree in computer science where Computer Engineering work a lot of projects in this field you might not think it's a big deal to have help it but it really is very important as with all learning the bulk of it is actually taking the high level stuff you learn from lecture and applying it to projects this is especially true in computer science since it's also an extremely applied field and just because you understand Concepts and how things work at a high level does not mean you know how to actually do anything implementation is another beast and it's really where you spend most of your time

I'll return back to this point later on because I do have some specific concerns surrounding this aspect of the degree but this is a good transition point for my general concerns we're really more like caveats that I think they don't advertise enough about this program which makes me believe that this program is actually not for most people so the reason is because there's a lot of assumed knowledge for this degree as I went through the syllabus for introduction to graduate algorithms software development process and the ML Class that make up the core of most specializations I noticed that they really are graduate level classes there's some underground material that you can find here and there like graph algorithms dynamic programming but they seem to be covered really quickly in the beginning and the rest of the material does really get up there and sure enough under the before taking this class suggests the background knowledge it says that students are expected to have an undergraduate course on the design and Analysis of algorithms in particular be familiar with basic graph algorithms DP divide and conquer Algos as well as an undergraduate course in discrete math and analyzing asymptotic runtimes of Algos and they really weren't lying when they say that you do require these courses like you really do looking at the other core classes substantial background requirements seems to hold for them too for example for the software development process class you have to know at least one programming language already and be familiar with basic software engineering Concepts through an undergraduate course in software engineering or have industry experience looking at the syllabus here they are not lying again I think it would be very difficult to get through this course without a decent background already and also taking a look at the ml course these are the course Readiness questions and here's the reading list you need linear algebra probability and stats and I would argue it would probably be nice to also have calculus although it doesn't seem necessary if the course doesn't venture too deeply into the ml outcomes in any case as you can see a lot of assumed knowledge here there are people who talk about getting accepted into this program without an undergraduate in computer science or related degree War have substantial self-study to get the equivalent of that undergraduate degree you will see that it is absolutely the case that it's extremely difficult you really do need to have a solid background and truthfully I find it a little bit weird for some of these people to have even gotten accepted into the program as this one guy said he literally failed the first two classes he took and barely made it to graduation despite substantial self-study and having a job at the devops because I had recently gotten a job as a devops engineer so I didn't really have any computer science background before starting the program in my first semester in Spring 2017 I took two courses so software development process and machine learning for trading both of these courses are considered beginner courses in the omscs program and I got two F's in both courses and this guy here just straight out dropped up of course there is selection bias here and there's not much of the sample size going on but I think it's worthwhile realizing that even if you can get into this degree it's really important to be honest about the background that you do have prior to attending if you don't have the background knowledge even if you try really really hard to catch up while taking the classes I think it would be insanely stressful challenging and you probably won't even get that much out of it so yes this degree is not for someone who doesn't have a related background and my second Point certainly back to what I said earlier that what you're paying for is they help with homework and projects I did some pretty intense dating here again yes selection bias but I only had what I could find on the internet and this is a nice little summary of The General sentiment of students it seems like the reason why the program manages to be so cheap is by skimming a bit on the amount of help they provide you with homework and projects for my own master's degree like 80 of the time was on homework and projects and there was absolutely no way I could have managed to get through it without large amounts of support from office hours Tas working with other students literally every single day as well as one-on-ones with instructors with the difficulty level of these classes and also much support you'll find yourself doing a lot of self-study the third point is more of a call for you to do more research than anything else and that's surrounding career opportunities I can't find job placements on their official website which is a huge red flag for me because the primary reason why people do horse-based master's degree is to get a better job so why would you not post where people end up I have to rely again on my own digging around and I don't know how reliable these comments are on places like Reddit or quora but it does seem like graduates do manage to get interviews I'm not surprised given the reputation of this program but it's still a little strange for them to not officially mention job placements also the only info that I could find were people who became software Engineers mostly attacked so what happens if you want to go into data science or some other related field so that's the thing we don't know right if I was seriously considering this program I would contact a program and ask them directly for some

stats okay moving along who is this program so I think there are two types of people that would benefit from this degree the first is someone who already has a related undergrad degree in computer science Computer Engineering for something equivalent to that and is self-discipline enough to stop study the second is someone who is willing to self-study essentially an entire undergraduate degree by themselves before attending the Master's Degree as an FYI the second type of person like honestly I've met a handful of them in my life and this guy here who is in the same cohort as me my master's degree is one of if you're not sure if you're that kind of person I suggest that you check out the video and just kind of observe his mindset and see if you're also someone like that overall I think it's really important to be honest with yourself here ask yourself are you really the type of person who can self-study everything beforehand I'm just gonna say straight out that this is definitely not me so if I didn't already have a master's degree in computer science I would not recommend myself to take this master's degree finally in a

Edition there is another group of people who should not take this master's degree and that group is international students if you're not American but hope to come to the US for a job since this is an online program you don't get a visa and so you don't get OBT from it so this will not help you get a job in the U. S all right this is my review of the OMS CS degree I hope it was useful for you let me know in the comments below if you're considering this program or you've already been through this program I would love to get your thoughts see you guys in the next video or live stream