I recently applied to––and am seriously considering attending––Brown’s DS program, but I have a few reservations.
1) The program is 1 year + a summer. Just from my undergrad experience, I have a hard time believing that you can become truly proficient in a skill that quickly.
2) It costs 60k. That's a lot of money.
4) Is it a competitive program? I can't tell.
I have an undergrad major that’s probably pretty useless ( I could explain, but I’ll save you the time), but I also have a sizable background in advanced math and com-sci courses. I got into a few other places like Brandeis’ MS for Liberal Arts students, UPenn’s MCIT, and Yale (for something in LA, not stem), but, as of now, Brown is my #1.
I’ve heard from a number of people about the growing field of DS and what a great, growing profession it is, but the ominous warnings I’ve heard about it being useless are making me hesitant. Any advice / professional insight?
@Tenkason - I don’t know about Brown’s program, but my nephew recently completed Cal Berkeley’s Master in Information and Data Science degree. It’s all on-line except for one week on campus. The September 2018, Pre-Priority Application Deadline is April 3, 2018
My nephew loved the program, and just got a new job as Director of Data Science with a new fast-growing company. His undergraduate degree was in operations management. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/programs/mids
@Beaudreau
Thanks for the link / info! That’s actually rather reassuring to know.
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Grad school is different from undergrad. You’re building on a foundation that you already have, so there’s less material to cover. Furthermore, the pace is much faster and you are expected to do and learn more in each one-semester course. It’s actually pretty common for statistics-related master’s programs to be about 1-1.5 years.
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Yes, it is. Do you have any debt from undergrad? And does the $60K include cost of living? Given the salaries and potential career growth in the data science field, if I had close to zero debt from undergrad and the $60K included the entire cost of attending the program, I think I would borrow that much money. A good data scientist can easily make 1.5-2 times that much money.
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I feel like the Forbes article is speaking to a very specific kind of student, but the author wrote the article too generally and gave it a bad headline. For reason 1 - sure, you can, in theory, enter the profession without getting an additional degree. However, I work closely with data scientists every day and most of them have advanced degrees. It’s not always in data science - in fact, it’s usually not in data science; more often it’s in math or statistics, or an engineering field. But they pretty much always have at least a master’s degree. There are lots of jobs you can get as an analyst or junior statistician/quant with a BS/BA but you will likely eventually need the MS/MA.
Reason 2 is moot in your case because it sounds like you have plenty of coursework to prepare you (although it’s unclear how much computer science you have).
Reason 3 is simply ridiculous. A national average salary of between $93K and $113K (depending on the source) is far more than the average salary for the vast majority of other careers; even $80K is an excellent salary for someone with a master’s degree. For most people who wish to get a master’s in data science that’s more than they can expect to earn in their current fields/jobs OR if they were to get a master’s in a different field.
Reason 4 is an actually legitimate one. I encourage everyone considering grad school to think about whether they are simply trying to avoid going on the job market. Even if they believe they can’t get a job with their current skill set, I encourage them to actually look. But if you know you want to be a data scientist, in your case OP it’s not a bad move.
- That doesn’t matter. The real question is, is this a high-quality program that will get you the kind of career opportunities you want? What’s the career placement look like?
Your current undergrad major (history) is not useless.
Data science is not useless. This is a field that is EXPLODING. I work in the tech industry and data scientists are in high demand - we collecting enormous amounts of data every day and we are always looking for smart people who can analyze it and make sense of it. A person who’s got some behavioral/social science understanding and can intelligently interpret the data - and tell us both what it can uncover and what it cannot - is even better. The data scientists I work with (amazing people, btw) and I spend a lot of time explaining to people that simple telemetry data cannot tell us human motivations or attitudes, just behaviors.
@juillet
Thank you for your insight; it was very helpful. And, yes, I am actually coming out of undergrad with no student debt. That’s part of the reason I’m seriously considering the program.
In regards to Forbes’ point 4, I worked on the job market for two years before college (on an oil rig), so I certainly would not say I’m shying away from the market. In fact, now that you mention it, it is probably a benefit rather than a hinderance that the program is one year (i.e., less debt and less time off the market).
Sounds like a graduate certificate. $60,000 is not worth the money even for a master’s degree, much less a certificate. You could go to graduate school and obtain a full masters degree for a fraction of that cost, and it would be worth much more. Most masters degrees in IT will teach you that and more. SQL is a fairly easy language to pick-up.
@coolguy40
I’m not sure where you’re getting that it’s not a master program. The full title is “Master’s Program in Data Science (ScM).” (https://www.brown.edu/initiatives/data-science/academic-programs/masters-data-science)
Your other points seem to line up with the Forbes article: it’s not worth paying 60k for a degree that you could teach yourself. That being said, I have only a slight base in com sci (two python courses), so I’m not so sure I could feasibly learn these skills on my own. The other strength of the program, I imagine, are the connections you would make from going to a school like Brown (with a pretty highly ranked com sci department, I may add). It’s also not like, say, Harvard’s Extension School or Columbia’s SPS where you get a certificate taught by faculty who have basically nothing to do with the school. The capstone project (that you work on with a faculty member of your choosing at the school) is probably that most appealing aspect of the program to me––and what I hear the most about from alum I’ve spoken to in the past day or so.
@Tenkason A masters program and masters degree are actually two separate things. Even reading through the website, Brown University is making this sound suspiciously ambiguous. From what I’m reading, it’s a re-branded graduate certificate for $60,000. A masters degree will almost always have a full thesis attached to the requirements, or allow you to substitute that with 2-3 additional classes. The requirements are usually 36 semester hours. If you search through Brown University for the cost of a full master’s degree, the cost will skyrocket to 100k or more.
My advice, go for a full masters degree. You can do that at a local university for a fraction of that cost. Employers usually only distinguish between a bachelors or a masters degree for job listings. To them a graduate program like that is technically more like “never finished a masters degree,” so your credentials are defaulted to bachelors. A masters degree at any university will trump an bachelors degree no matter where the bachelors degree came from. Database programming is an IT field and those degrees are a much easier than a masters in CS.
@coolguy40 Thanks again for your input.
I suppose my response would be that UVA has the same layout as Brown, and its graduates seem to achieve a good measure of success: 100% employment rate with an average salary of 92k for their first graduating class (https://dsi.virginia.edu/student-services/employment-statistics).
My only options for CS masters are Brandeis (half funding, so the same price as Brown for 2 years) and UPenn’s MCIT (like 120k). Honestly, Brandeis would probably be my #2 behind Brown. No other schools around me have data science programs (aside from certificates), and I don’t think it’s a great idea for me to be thrust into a regular com sci program when I only know python and a bit of R.
It’s a shame the program is so new…hard to find outside info on the program.
@coolguy40 What? Most of what you’re saying is not accurate.
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A master’s program leads to a master’s degree - they’re two different ways of saying the same thing. They are not separate things. The data science master’s program at Brown leads to a master’s degree.
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Master’s programs do not “almost always” have a full thesis; in fact, the opposite is true: most master’s programs do not require you to write a thesis to get the degree. This is especially true of professional degree programs. Coursework-only programs are very, very, very common.
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Master’s degree programs are different lengths depending on the area, the content, and the design. It’s not uncommon for professional quantitative programs (statistics, applied math, data science, etc.) to be one year in length and thus cost less. That does not mean that they are basically certificate programs.
Additionally, Employers in many fields do recognize graduate certificates and the like and it is not universally true that a master’s degree from anywhere trumps a bachelor’s degree no matter where it came from. There are lots of other factors in play, and it totally depends on the field and the hiring manager.
OP, when did you submit your application to Brown? I am still waiting on a response and I submitted in early February. If I get in, I will attend, so maybe I’ll see ya there!
I have one relative in this field. Self taught. Already had 20 years work experience with an EE degree & an MBA. Makes much more than any of the salaries listed above.
@Tenkason : The article you cited in the original post in this thread seems to be accurate. My relative had substantial experience at solving real world business problems. Highly intelligent (1600 SAT long ago when such a score was a rarity & 800 on the GMAT & graduated well into the top 5% of his class at a well respected university). But his base salary exceeds the largest # mentioned in the article by a substantial amount–but he entered as a VP. No data analytics degree, just self taught.
I consulted a couple STEM professors at my uni, and they were all pretty enthusiastic about the program. My comsci professor laughed when I brought up the concern of it being a “rebranded certificate;” i.e., he was a BIG fan of the course layout and structure––a solid masters program, he said. Given the professional opinions from @juillet and several STEM professors, I’m pretty sure I’ll be accepting the offer.
@questionsg
Check your PM box.
@Publisher
You sort of said in all with “my relative had substantial experience at solving real world business problems.” I do NOT have that. Moreover, I don’t know what your relative majored in for undergrad, but I’m imagining it wasn’t a LA.
@Tenkason: Yes, I was relating that information to the article that you cited above. I do understand that that is NOT your situation.