
Ask HN: Master's degree vs. MOOC for a full time software engineer - mofury
My motivation of asking this question is not about finding a job. I am already a Senior Software Engineer at a startup in the Bay Area. I am looking to advance my career and solve bigger problems. I&#x27;ve been taking ML&#x2F;AI courses from Stanford on YouTube&#x2F;Coursera and from Georgia Tech on Udacity. Suppose money is not a big concern to me, (i.e. I am willing to pay for high quality education) how should I pick between accredited CS MS degree and MOOC? Which one do you think will add more value to me down the road? There are 3 options available to me at the moment.<p>1.) Stanford online MS degree (Expensive $$$)
2.) Georgia Tech online MS degree (Strongly recommended by coworkers)
3.) Multiple Nanodegrees from Udacity<p>Practicality is good but at the same time, I&#x27;d really appreciate the depth of MS courses such as the mathematical derivation of batch normalization, backpropgation and etc...I&#x27;m hoping HN would give me couple tips and advice.
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brudgers
[random remarks from the internet]

In addition to everything else it may be, Master's degree is a public
achievement. It has about 900 years of history [1]. It confers a social status
(that may or may not be valued by another individual). There's nothing wrong
with assigning a non-nil value to any or all of those things. If a person
does, then a master's is non-fungible with a nano-degree.

The other thing a Master's is more likely to provide than a nano-degree is a
network of other students and the program's professors. And of course the
Stanford and Georgia Tech alumni networks are meaningfully stronger than
Udacity's. [2]

The third rail is an on-campus graduate education. I mean if your working at a
startup and what you really want is to learn, then on campus is more of what
you really want. And it opens up many many more educational options. Specific
professors. Specific topics. All over the world. [3]

Good luck.

[1]: It's also formal, like this citation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_degree#Medieval_era...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_degree#Medieval_era_to_18th_century)

[2]: Though an online degree almost certainly creates weaker network
connections than an in person educational setting.

[3]: If you want to advance your career through education, on-campus full
commitment.

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rrishi
I am at Georgia Tech on-campus and can definitely recommend the MS CS program
here. I believe online also has a similar standard to on-campus.

