OMSCS Open Courseware

I would like to get my masters from georgia tech's omscs program but between work and 2 kids I dont see how I'll ever have the time

One course per semester might be doable? Not sure how frequently the assignments are due because you could probably carve out some time over the weekends.

Yeah, thinking about waiting until both the kids themselves are in school and then 1 course a semester for me. Not sure if that will be easier or harder than doing it while they are young

OMSCS grad here. The awesome thing about the program is its flexibility. Some of the courses are definitely more time intensive, but I think if you took only one class and dedicated about an hour a day to the course materials, you'd be in good shape. (I know that's still a lot to ask of someone with two young kids.)

There's no way to get through the harder courses in the program on 1 hour a day. And you're not getting value from the degree if you aren't pushing yourself to take those hard courses, unless you just need the diploma.

There's a web site where different people share what they think of each course, and how many hours they devote per week: https://www.omscentral.com/

That might help you decide whether it's doable.

My first (and only) course was somewhere in the middle in terms of effort, and the courses I was most interested would have required another 50% on top, which wasn't going to work for me, between work, parenting, other learning etc.

Is a masters of really holding anyone back once you have a couple years of experience?

I did it with two kids (both were in school at that point, which helps). It -is- a lot of work. I spent maybe an hour a day during most days of the week, and then for some things I'd try to get a few more hours early or late in the day on the weekend. And for the most part I only did one class per semester. I did two for one semester because they were both expected to be fairly easy, and that worked out, but I definitely wouldn't do that with GA or any of the ML stuff.

It's doable, that's all I'm saying. But you will definitely need to be committed to see it through to the end, and you will be happy to have your life back when you're done.

As a childless OMSCS graduate, I also can’t imagine doing it while having kids, because it took basically all of my free time. That said, I met quite a few people in the program who were in situations similar to yours. I have no idea how they managed it, but they somehow did.

I completed OMSCS with 2 kids (both preschool), taking 1 class per semester from Fall 2019 to Spring 2023. It was possible thanks to having full remote job and a very supportive wife. I learned a lot, but I probably wouldn't do it again, it was extremely unhealthy, especially for certain classes like Distributed Computing (CS7210).

Why was it extremely unhealthy? The work load? The lack of sleep with work, kids, and school? Asking because I’m sorta in the same position

Specifically CS7210 is demanding because of its assignments. The assignments come from UW's CSE452, have very little direct connection with the course lectures, and require you to implement a Paxos-like system correctly, basically in one shot, in an environment that is very difficult to debug. So the projects turn into 60-80-hour slogs where students change parameters semi-randomly until something starts working. CS7210 shares that aspect with a number of other courses in the program.

Mostly lack of sleep and having to sacrifice a lot of weekends to work on the assignments. I took OMSCS with the goal of learning as much as possible since I did not have a traditional CS degree, so I took all the hard classes in the Computing Systems track (DC, Compilers, ISL:BE, IHPC, etc).

CS7210 (DC) is the hardest class I took. We had to write a correct Paxos implementation, then use it to build a distributed sharded KV store. I remember having to spend 10+ hours on a single day during weekend. It was worth it though, learned a lot about distributed consensus, and how difficult it is to get right (there were test failures that were fixed after hours of debug, and the fix was literally changing the order of some code lol).

I just enjoy school, nothing is holding me back.

is there a decent list of omscs courses to avoid on this basis?

Thanks for sharing that! I still have a lot of time to think about enrolling thankfully.

That's one of the classes I would really like to take. If I end up doing it the kids might spend a lot of time with grandma that semester.