As someone currently mid-career in UT Austin’s part time MS in Software Engineering program, avoid this program. I got my undergrad from Georgia Tech 10 years ago, and Georgia Tech is better in every regard.
UT has this nice list online that they never truly offer - you have at most 3 courses to pick from each semester. And to finish in 2 years you have to take the summer course, which there is one class and no options to pick from. Last summer I took algorithms… probably one of the first CS courses you ever take. I have to take whatever classes are offered every semester to actually finish in 2 years.
The program is disorganized, with you not knowing what classes offered are till a month before registration. And the program scheduling is awful. It’s a Friday and Saturday once a month. It has consistently been on every 3-day weekend.
The program does nothing to accommodate full-time workers despite its description. The courses are re-packaged regular MS courses, complete with all the homework and office hours in the middle of the work day. Sometimes you’ll have projects that are awkwardly due, due to requiring information from lectures once a month. And you will spend time doing tedious projects - most of them are not well-designed to reinforce the course material and end up being busy work.
All in all, it’s not worth it. It has marginal value a few years out if you don’t have a CS undergrad, but it’s value drops quickly with every year of experience.
Also a UT Option III student, same as you. I too regret doing the program. It just feels like such a hassle and to your point it is extremely disorganized.
I will say certain instructors like Vijay Garg make the program feel worth it. You learn new material, read research papers, and have implementations around research papers. His courses were the reason I stuck around. I took his advanced algorithms and distributed systems courses which were great.
That's sad to hear. I'm in UT's online data science masters and I think it's great. They have some teething problems (we're the first cohort taking a lot of these classes), but it's all pretty minor stuff like delays in getting invoiced etc. We seem to have more choice in lectures than you do each semester, and we definitely don't have to spend particular days doing coursework on long weekends. Things have been pretty flexible for us so far at least. The most important thing for me is that there's enough material in there and that its reasonably advanced, so I feel like it's worth doing this one for sure.
Thanks for the heads up, was also considering this recently and their list of courses does look very interesting but also saw their schedule seemed pretty bare.
It’s stayed the same despite feedback. The professors have asked for feedback and have gotten a bit defensive when people overwhelmingly have said that the course load for particular courses is too high for working professionals.
UT has this nice list online that they never truly offer - you have at most 3 courses to pick from each semester. And to finish in 2 years you have to take the summer course, which there is one class and no options to pick from. Last summer I took algorithms… probably one of the first CS courses you ever take. I have to take whatever classes are offered every semester to actually finish in 2 years.
The program is disorganized, with you not knowing what classes offered are till a month before registration. And the program scheduling is awful. It’s a Friday and Saturday once a month. It has consistently been on every 3-day weekend.
The program does nothing to accommodate full-time workers despite its description. The courses are re-packaged regular MS courses, complete with all the homework and office hours in the middle of the work day. Sometimes you’ll have projects that are awkwardly due, due to requiring information from lectures once a month. And you will spend time doing tedious projects - most of them are not well-designed to reinforce the course material and end up being busy work.
All in all, it’s not worth it. It has marginal value a few years out if you don’t have a CS undergrad, but it’s value drops quickly with every year of experience.