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From: gds@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Greg Skinner)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: additional education
Keywords: masters correspondence alternatives
Message-ID: <37873@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 9 Aug 90 07:21:31 GMT
References: <1990Aug3.005036.20679@sqwest.sq.com> <2717@promark.UUCP>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: gds@la.tis.com (Greg Skinner)
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In article <2717@promark.UUCP> mark@promark.UUCP (Mark J. DeFilippis) writes:
>I know so many people who went back for their Masters in Comp Sci.
>All of them for the wrong reason.

Well, if you would like to hear my story.  It's a little different.  I
went back to get my MS because I wanted to learn some things better
that I didn't know very well.  I had been a communications/distributed
systems programmer for four years, but had weak and incomplete
understanding of algorithms, computability, complexity, and graph
theory.  I also wanted to learn some more about the tools one uses to
model communications systems (such as queueing theory, linear
programming, etc.).

>I have yet to find a Masters CS program that is worth my time and
>effort.

Well, at least UCLA's MS program had the courses and professors doing
research in the areas I wanted to improve in.  It's also cheap :-)
because I'm a California resident.

>Most universities don't even require a
>thesis, but allow the substitution of two exams, one is the
>fundamentals of CS, which requires little more then a 4 year CS
>degree.

You can do a thesis here if you want, and most people seem to.  A
number of people come here and decide to stay for PhD's, so their MS
theses (which are quite substantial) are a major step towards their
dissertations.

>The point I am trying to make is that the degree has much less value
>when there is no standardization, and since industry really don't
>respect the degree many employers don't know the good from the
>poor schools (with a few noted exceptions) and could care less
>since they rarely pay you for the MS.

One of the conclusions I have come to, having been in school for a
year now (hopefully one year left to go), is that the worth of the
degree is what you think it's worth.  You can make it work for you if
you want, or not.  I tried to take classes which would help me be a
better engineer in any job I might get, and so far it seems to have
worked.

>One thing I found really helpful and very interesting are the
>technical conferences given by various vendors.

I had been to a number of conferences before I went back to get my
degree, and knew a fairly good amount of the latest networking
standards.  (I'd also done development work in some of them, so that
helped.)  However, I knew more about *what* they were, more so than
*why* they worked (if they even worked at all).  When someone asked me
a technical question, I could parrot back to them the answer, because
I knew the facts, but I didn't know all the principles.  After taking
a couple of classes in queueing theory, a class in algorithm analysis,
and a class in graph theory, I felt like I was on much surer footing
in describing why something worked, under what conditions it might
fail, etc.

--gregbo