How I chose my masters degree (as an international student)

so this is not exactly why i decided to do my master's degree but tbh is not too far from the truth in this video i'll walk you guys through the four major reasons why i chose to apply to three master's programs and stay until the very end to see why i decided to choose my master's program in the end so the programs i applied for were number one news masters in engineering management number two you chicago masters in computer science and number three upends masters in computer and information technology so in chicago and u-pen were technical degrees in computer science specifically for people who didn't have a technical background duke was a little bit different since it was an engineering management degree that's marketed as an alternative to an mba that's supposed to be more like tech savvy so there were four major reasons why i chose to apply to these degrees and the first one is job prospects

was the major reason why i didn't go for a data science specific program despite the fact i'm now a data scientist i knew a more general degree in computer science were duke's engineering management degree program offered more flexibility and options in terms of jobs what i mean by this is like if you do have a data science degree your job is pretty narrowed in on either data science or maybe data analysts but with a computer science or engineering management degree you can work in software engineering data science product management and many other options i had real commitment issues and given that i had failed to choose my first career correctly aka doctor now i had some serious adults about my ability of even knowing what i wanted that's why i wanted a degree that would open up lots of doors for me and most importantly wouldn't lead me potentially without a job because the opg life and i didn't want to get kicked out of the country these three degrees all had great job prospects and had alumni networks that spanned a great many professions and industries my second consideration

was coursework i wanted to have a lot of different coursework to choose from this eliminated lots of master's programs since many of them didn't have a wide selection of courses i am very greedy all three of these programs though had a very impressive selection of coursework duke's program is the most impressive in this regard students can specialize in specific engineering disciplines take technical coursework and a variety of management courses too it's an incredibly flexible program by comparison uchicago and upenn were not even close in terms of coursework selection but compared to other master's programs they did have excellent selections since these were computer science degrees the courses were by nature technical courses with a couple exceptions for electives beyond the core courses each chicago had well-defined tracks of data analytics high performance computing mobile computing and software engineering each of these tracks have courses that cover the topics well u-pen on the other hand did not have specializations but they did have great breadth in data science such machine learning areas advanced programming algorithms systems and many more absolutely awesome for someone indecisive like myself

number three prestige now prestige is something that i know matters for some people and doesn't matter as much for others in my case though it did matter a lot to me because i just didn't think it was worth paying so much money and actually it's five times my entire four-year undergraduate program unless the school i was going to was prestigious and the program was prestigious this is certainly not as solid as a reason as say like job prospects or coursework but in my mind i just couldn't justify that since almost all master's degrees in the united states cost so much that actually eliminated many programs in schools that were not considered as prestigious i did this just based off school rankings and programs acceptance rates with the assumption that lower acceptance rate is equal to more prestige perhaps i fell for the ad popular fallacy here aka fallacy that the more popular something is the better it is but not gonna lie this is definitely a really big factor for me not surprisingly my list of three schools upenn chicago and duke are all considered very prestigious schools and each program is considered highly reputable as well

now my last consideration is number four return on investment life prestige this one is also rooted in cost but specifically for return on investment we're roi i was pretty adamant i wanted to go to a school that would pay itself back in less than two years this meant the salary of this jobs post-grad had to be at least around six figures luckily computer science degrees are no defeated to six-figure jobs so this criterium didn't eliminate any technical programs but it did eliminate some more business analytic key like programs that had average alumni salaries that were a fair bit lower duke's program though did pass this bar because it fed into engineering data science and product management positions that usually made around six figures so those were my four major considerations what about you guys let me know in the comments below what you would look for in a master's degree or if you already did one what you looked for then kenji actually did a video last week as well about how he chose his master's program and i highly recommend that you check that out too because you might be very surprised to know how different our criteria are all right so in the end i got accepted into duke and yup i was honestly pretty surprised i got sensitive to upend and not you chicago not the other way around since the underground talk was that you chicago was supposed to be less selective than penn but who knows maybe my application just rubs someone the wrong way or whatever in any case i had to now choose between duke and up i ultimately went for pen because i finally decided i wanted something that was more technical and figured that it's far easier to go from more technical to less technical than the other way around although duke offered some coursework in computer science and engineering given that it was a one year program not including their internship there's only so much you can do and it's still a far cry from a true technical degree another reason was that you penn's mcit's job prospects were far more attractive to me they had people going into software engineering product management and data science related fields and tech finance and lots of other different industries duke's master's in engineering management program also had really impressive alumni profiles but some of those job titles were things like i would never consider doing like corporate development manager where like r d design um and many of the companies that alumni worked at were either government affiliated were pretty traditional industries just to be clear there's absolutely nothing wrong with that i just didn't see myself and still don't see myself going into anything similar to that prestige and roi were similar enough for these two programs i didn't really factor that much into my final decision in the end upenn's mcid program seemed to suit my needs better than duke's master's in engineering management program so i packed my bags for philadelphia now if i actually got into chicago's computer science program that would have been a much tougher choice i think i also wanted to mention that i did have a backup plan in case all these schools rejected me i would have applied for university british columbia's second bachelor's in computer science designed specifically for people without a technical bachelor's degree this program had a far later application date so i would have had enough time to apply after hearing back from all the other schools this was a backup mostly because i really wanted to have a master's degree then another bachelor's degree and it doesn't really have anything to do with the program itself which i think is actually pretty good so there you go that's how i ended up going to upenn's mcit program i hope this video was helpful for you guys and i'll see you guys in the next video