
Ask HN: Switching schools to Georgia Tech worth it? - paat
I am considering leaving my current Masters of CS program at a lower ranking school to attend GT OMSCS.<p>How important is a degree from a top CS school in regards to getting a job at a FAANG company?<p>Should I just stay at my current school and practice leetcode every day until I graduate instead?<p>My bachelors and work experience are not relevant.
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ploika
You personally are the one who will be hired or not, not a fungible Georgia
Tech Graduate (or otherwise).

See if you can find out where previous graduates of your current masters ended
up, and compare it to the Georgia Tech masters. If dropping out and moving on
will lead to a genuine step change in your career prospects, give it serious
consideration. If it will just result in more debt and more stress for broadly
similar prospects (assuming you get accepted and then succeed at the new
course), just focus on learning and being employable from where you are.

I'm based in Europe so I don't know what the jobs market in the USA is truly
like. I have to ask though, is it really that important to get a job at a
FAANG company?

Is it genuinely the case that you won't find interesting, fulfilling and well-
paid work outside of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google? Are you even
sure that you _will_ have a great job in one of those five places?

Good-but-not-top-tier universities routinely produce very good graduates with
very good prospects. Boring companies have a lot of interesting problems to
solve, and lots of them let you wear jeans to work too. Google has plenty of
drudgery and office politics.

If the companies you're aiming for will not consider you unless you went to
one of a select few expensive elite universities, that's probably not a great
reflection on them either.

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paat
Yes, I actually already went on linkedIn and checked to see how many people
from my school got jobs at FAANG companies (including Intel). There were very
few, and most of them have non-engineering related bachelor's degrees. Only
one of them was an engineer at google.

When you look at Georgia Tech graduates on linkedIn, the opposite is true.
Hence, me making this thread.

Don't get me wrong though, my school does seem to be pretty decent at getting
people local jobs. But that wasn't really my goal personally. I want to escape
my home town.

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giantg2
Is that straight numbers or percentages?

The bigger school has more people, making it more likely to have some get into
FAANG. PSU is huge and some students go on to FAANG, but that wouldn't
increase any individual's chances.

If you go to someplace like Stanford or MIT, then maybe those names help you
get in due to the prestige, but I don't think Georgia Tech is that level.

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paat
Just numbers. And yes you make a good point.

I do think Georgia Tech is a top school for computer science though.

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runawaybottle
It’s tough to give feedback because GA Tech is very selective, and about every
other online program is cost prohibitive (yeah I can’t afford 10k plus per
year, anyone that can is an upper tier of society competing amongst
themselves, we haven’t reached open yet). The whole situation is not built on
a real market yet. We are in the infancy.

In other words, in the Wild West, you must make your own toil.

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kyawzazaw
Is GaTech OMSCS that selective?

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paat
Nope.

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jki275
GA Tech will be cheaper, having GA Tech on your resumé is a net positive in a
job search.

Beyond that, you're going to be starting over, and frankly the GA Tech
experience isn't very good in any way -- speaking as a student that's half way
through the program.

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paat
I am aware of that. I have been reading about what the courses are like on the
reddit and quite frankly it sounds like hell to me.

I am mostly interested in security, and not so interested in AI/ML. Robotics
does sound pretty cool though.

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jki275
AI4R is a phenomenal course, and it's run by a couple of great professors who
actually care about teaching it.

ML4T is another amazing course that's run by a great professor who actually
cares about teaching.

Unfortunately I haven't found any other courses like those.

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logicslave
Leetcode is all that matters. Nothing else matters in this industry anymore

