My UPenn MCIT Experience

my english has clearly degenerated as my computer science skills increased that's a good sign the program that i went to is called mcit at the university of pennsylvania so uh this is a program for people who don't have a computer science or engineering or a customer for like computer sciencey technical degree and want to get a master's in it and then you can go do all these like computer science jobs in the future so it's a two-year degree with the first year being very core uh so that you learn all the core computer science and like the mathematical stuff uh the would have learned their first year so it kind of like catches you up to speed and by the end you know you should know your basic computer science information and then in the second year um this is where you take electives like

data science natural language processing clearly i went into data science after but yes so you have a bunch of electives you can do like systems engineering databases all sorts of things that normal people in computer science master's degree would be doing for their two years i'll just talk a little bit about my experience throughout that entire journey so you know as i was saying coming in i knew a little bit of programming python i took a couple classes in my undergrad in python i also worked in bioinformatics so i knew r data science stuff i never really like learned all the like algorithms and like data structures and all those things didn't know how to do any of that also my math background was actually very like was very weak so i never did like linear algebra uh what else do math people do discreet math so coming in you know pretty nervous it's like oh i hope i pass and i'm able to get a job and then i was right to be nervous because my first year was really quite difficult i don't want to scare anyone but it really was probably the most challenging year i've ever had academically so let's see the three classes that i took in my first semester were um the course codes were cit 591 592-593 so online one was a introduction to java class and that class pretty much just taught you how to do like four loops and just basic java programming um and 592 was the class of how you discrete math probability and proofs which i've never done before until now and 593 which is a basic computers i think it's like computer systems class it's very um like low level stuff we pretty much went from like bytes and bits all the way up until c levelish so you learned about how computers are actually working under the hood you also have the program in assembly which is a language that's very low level and in the second semester there was a continuation which were 5 four five nine five and five nine six in five nine one five nine four it was a continuation of programming in java and in this class we learned about data structures

mostly i would i think this is the class of the most useful if you want to eventually become a software engineer uh because it's mostly your 3d code things and whatnot and for yeah so that was but it was it definitely wasn't an easy class because this whole program is very accelerated so you're coming in not really knowing anything because you don't really have that background there's no like background that you need to have and if you're like me you'll have a very strong math background uh or coding background it was just like yeah so yeah 594 and then 595 was a continuation of the systems class so we did some a little bit of web stuff kind of get a taste for that and also maybe it's yeah we did more c the c plus uh yes and it was more like a sampling of different program programming languages and finally it was 596 was the algorithms class and this is kind of like a continuation of 592 in the fall so this was more you don't really do coding this class except for a little bit of python but you learn about like recursion learn about different sorting algorithms um calculating like big o that's time complexity and things like that and that essentially brought you up speed more or less so that you can go take electives the following year so let's talk about internships

right so it was definitely it was very difficult not only because you had to learn all the things that you probably didn't know before you just kind of like thrown into that on top of that you also have to do

internship preparation so in doing internship preparation if you want to be a software engineer which most people want it to be you have to do like lead code prepping whiteboarding things like that not only so much like behavioral stuff but you have to do a lot of 4d interviews with technical interviews so personally i didn't really do lead code so i'm not saying that you have to do lead code because i didn't do it and i still got an internship but that was also my personal experience and most people i knew did you lead code and the reason why i didn't do it wasn't because i thought i was so good and i was able to do everything and amazing i was just like very overwhelmed so i just ended up maybe doing like one or two lead codes and try to depend on my personality through the interviews if i didn't know how to answer technical questions so anyways i ended up interning at goldman sachs uh doing soft i went as a software engineer but i ended up doing more like data science related stuff uh because that was the part that was more interesting to me so uh yeah a lot of people i know they end up like doing internships like big tech companies like amazon i don't know about facebook i think there was like one that went to google um but a lot of other people also do like smaller startups um if you're doing software engineering or like mid-sized companies so i don't know if i have this statistic completely right but i do believe that almost everybody everybody that wanted to get an internship did get an internship there's no guarantee that you get like an amazing internship about like google you know or like amazon or anything like that but everybody that wanted an internship in software engineering did get one and this program is really designed for you to be able to get a job and then so they're very good that internship process um so of course you also have to put in a lot of work for it but that pen branding as well as just like working hard that pen branding an entire program really helped you prepare for that

so the second year of mcit was very was like was when you're released into the wild above all the other computer science people and you can take whatever electives that you want uh but bear in mind even though we did do this sort of like one year ramp up acceleration boot camp kind of thing you're really not at the level of people who do like a four-year undergrad degree so my advice is to actually still be pretty cautious about what electives that you're choosing like you want to go and jump and do like this super high level c plus programming when you've done it for like maybe two weeks uh in 595 right of course if you want to do that you can also teach yourself but i did not do that and most people i know also did not do that um so yeah like the electives you have choices in like natural language processing in data analytics data science databases uh web development web design i think there's some other classes are like more systems related as well cryptography and you can also do more advanced algorithm classes more like theoretical algorithm classes so yeah you take your electives and the thing with because it's a two-year degree and last year you were you know like busy preparing for internships and stuff then this year rolls around and now you're really busy preparing for job interviews assuming that you weren't one of the lucky people who landed an internship and then became full-time and then don't actually have to do worry about that anymore but for myself and most other people we then had to prepare for job inter for job interviews for software engineering

people usually tend to do better in their full-time job interviewing than their internships naturally because they have more experience at this point and you do get a lot of people learning those big names like people going to google facebook just like fang in general as well as other startups as well if you're not doing software engineering there's people who go to data science rules whether in tech or not in tech i'm in a data science role right now in tech uh and you have people who are also doing quant trading or like quantitative research and there's even people who pursue phds either in computer science or non-computer science as well as there's also people doing a lot it's a pretty diverse group of people wanting to switch their careers whether that be completely in tech and doing software engineering or just wanting to do a job that's more technical in nature i would say my experience was positive and i don't think i would have been being able to land the job that i have right now if i didn't go through the mcrit program and i think a lot of other people would also agree with that statement it's a master's degree that really elevates your current resume if you want to make that career jump and just that branding as well as the preparation that you get just by being a whole pool of people pretty much doing the same thing as you as well as being exposed to uh recruiters does make it pretty worthwhile yes so the cost definitely isn't cheap i believe it's around 50 each year uh i would say it is worth it though because the starting salaries of most people coming out of here is six figures so you know you make that back within one year work where you know one or two years depending on how good you are with money and how much you're making but i do think overall it is worth it in

terms of admissions i think the year that i was admitted the missionary was maybe around like 11 percent don't quote me on that they do publish how much it is uh how many people are admitted each year and you do have to do the gre you have to go through like this application process so the average geri verbal was in the high 150s and for the math it was 167 so you do have to score pretty highly on the quantitative reasoning portion which makes sense because this is a quantitative program i would say if you're gonna there's a lot of people who get like great gre scores who have great gpas pretty good recommendations so if you really want to stand on that pool the most important consideration would be your

personal statement so you can imagine these reviewers have like tons and tons of applications that pretty much like look really similar like unless you're like really interesting background you're you know probably pretty similar to the next person in the application pile and you're reading all those personal statements it gets really boring really fast so if you want to stand out make your personal statement good make it interesting so that the reviewer can actually remember you after they read your application and of course make sure that all your scores are there i can't think of anything else to talk about but feel free to reach out to me if you guys want to get a little bit more information on something that i didn't mention or i was very confusing about something and i can help explain that a little bit better so thank you all for watching i hope this was useful