Georgia Tech Online Masters in CS (OMSCS) so far:
Back during Fall of 2016 after I graduated, I had a lot of free time on my hands. I worked a 9 to 5 job and came home to play games. It was fun but I felt like I could be doing more. I wanted to continue learning after college. I decided to enroll into Georgia Tech’s online masters program for computer science, dubbed the OMS in CS.
I would say it’s been worth it so far. Aside from a solid credible degree at a steep discount, I really like learning and trying to apply what I learn to my job and also to my side projects.
Here are my experiences with various OMS classes:
Spring 2017
This became my all time favorite class. It was the class that hooked me into the program. I was super skeptical at first, both of the program and of its legitimacy. Charles Isbell and Michael Littman silenced all of my doubts. They showed me how delightful and thorough an online course could be. These two ML wizards made the content so digestible that I even wrote a Medium article detailing what I had learned. The class gave me a wonderful impression of the OMS program.
Fall 2017
Since Michael Littman and Charles Isbell were such amazing professors, I wanted to take more courses with them. So I took CS 7642: Reinforcement Learning, the perfect followup where I learned about their adventures with Smoov and Curly (fictional characters made by Prof. Littman and Isbell). The curriculum this time dove deep into the realm of reinforcement learning and defined for me a possible career path! I thought it would be dope as fu- *ahem* I thought it would be wonderful to work on teams such as OpenAI and DeepMind to create programs that can beat humans at various games and tasks.
I took HCI in addition to test the workload. I was curious if I could handle working and taking 2 classes at the same time. I picked HCI because I felt like it would be a relatively easy class. I was wrong. While the content wasn’t hard, there was still an annoying amount of work to do. Between the class project and homework assignments, this course required a decent amount of effort to get an A.
I learned from this semester that taking 2 classes is really hard but manageable given strict scheduling and planning.
Spring 2018
This was a solid grad course with heavy real world applicability. The homework involved using state of the art tech (at the time) such as Hadoop, Spark, and Microsoft Azure services. We had to do a final project that continued on this theme. We chose the MIMIC health data, cleaned and kneaded the data, and ran a bunch of various algorithms on it. I definitely learned a lot about the real world ML process from this class.
Fall 2018
This was also a solid grad course with heavy real world applicability. This time, the homework involved using modern visualization tools ranging from Tableau to D3. The final project continued upon this theme. First we had to find a dataset and clean it up. This time however, rather than running algorithms on the data, we plugged the data into our custom built D3 visualization. The idea was to provide insights into the data prior to any algorithms.
Spring 2019
AI4R was a good class for learning the fundamentals about robotics. Topics ranged from robot localization to path finding and proper robotic control. The homework assignments were reasonable exercises in understanding except for the last one. The last one felt both rushed and repetitive. It increased the difficulty arbitrarily by simply tacking on more work at the end of the semester. I was also a little disappointed when I realized we weren’t going to learn about conv-nets and how they help self driving cars. This course was more about laying the foundations that lead up to conv-nets and modern self driving cars.
Ed Tech was a much more research heavy class than I would have liked. Assignments seemed overly stringent on word count and other arbitrary things. I felt like I was fluffing a lot of my assignments up. The final project felt the same way. I just wanted to make something, but there had to be extraneous process involved, which was annoying.
Fall 2019
Looking forward to this semester! I pray it is better than last semester (another 2 course semester, hopefully more manageable too since 6440 is relatively easy according to reviews).
Spring 2020
Save the best for last, eh? …RIP future me
th-th-th-th-that’s all folks! happy studying~
