How Many Hours Does It Take To Get a Masters Degree?

The Answer? 1,017

Over the course of almost 3 years, I took 10 courses at Georgia Tech, specializing in Machine Learning.

Overall, I would say the value of the course was perfectly correlated with the amount of hours spent on the course (go figure).

Below is a chart showing the semester I took the class, the colloquial short name for the course via reddit r/omscs, and the hours spent on that course.

Since my specialization was Machine Learning, the courses related to that topic were very helpful. Machine Learning, Machine Learning for (Stock) Trading, Deep Learning, AI Ethics, and Graduate Algorithms give me fundamental understanding in those topics. Today, I apply that base knowledge in my work and hobbies.

My original plan was to take 10 courses to fulfill the requirements of both the computing systems and machine learning specializations - then pick the specialization I wanted to graduate with during my last semester. However, after taking GIOS (computing systems) and ML4T (machine learning) simultaneously, I decided to double down on the ML specialization.

This proved to be a prudent choice, because shortly after starting the program OpenAI released chatGPT, and the floodgates were opened.

Fundamental knowledge of the building blocks of ML and these SOTA algorithms is a must-have in the current landscape of software development.

Conclusion

I’d recommend the hard classes. They suck, a lot (especially while working full time), but you learn the most and also get to impress yourself with your grit and ability to focus for hours and hours and hours on end.

• Omscs
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