Masters: Math-based or Engineering-based gruaduate school more useful for web-focussed developer?

Question

Hi all,

This is in follow-up to a previous question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/189321/whats-important-for-a-computer-science-masters-program-application

I've been lucky in that I've been admitted to two programs I really like, but now I'm stuck in deciding between them as I don't know what's better for me in the long-term.

I'll name the schools school1 and school2.

School1 has the better rep (internationally recognized), and is more Math-oriented. However professionally it seems aligned with the finance industry. (I'm trying to move out of that industry)

School2 doesn't have anywhere near as good a rep, but its graduate CS program is rated well and its much more focussed on engineering with research in stuff like peer-to-peer networking.

I really want to be working in the web-industry after I graduate so I figured that an engineering emphasis might be more useful than an emphasis on math, but I don't really know.

• What do other people think is more important based on their experiences?

• Has anyone here studied in a math-oriented graduate program? If so, what are you working on now?

• Is school reputation in the workplace more important than the focus of the program?

• To those who hire developers - what would you prefer?

• What is the difference in how math and engineering programs are considered in academic circles?

I know this question is REALLY subjective, and its quite hard to answer without an intricate knowledge of where I want to go and what I plan to do post-graduation, so I greatly appreciate any guidance! I wasn't sure where else would be a good place to get opinions on this.

Answer 1

"The web industry" has very wide definition, so it can range anywhere from cloud computing, to web design.

Now, for "math" vs. "engineering", well that depends on your definition of these. Is for example computational complexity theory "math" or "engineering"?

Anyways, if I where you, I'd go for the one, that fits you better.

Answer 2

I would say it depends on your previous education. If you have a liberal arts background then you would definitely benefit from an engineering background (which is what I did). The liberal arts degree gives you the basis for learning how to ask questions and search for answers. The engineering degree will give you a strong emphasis on how to get things done.

Liberal Arts -> good for the overall view

Engineering -> good for the detailed view

I did an undergraduate in Physics at a small liberal arts college. I got my MS/PhD in electrical engineering at a prestigious university. With respect to mathematics I had to play catch up once I got to engineering school which included taking some remedial engineering classes to get caught up with my peers. I asked a lot of questions in my engineering classes (being used to that from my undergraduate days) which surprised a lot of the professors and students. The professors actually liked it as most of the engineering students were used to taking verbatim notes during class and rarely engaged the professor.

Having said all that I think that if you want to be in the web industry after you graduate, then you would get more relevant experience at school 2.

You might want to spend your money in a different way. If you have saved the money for college and have it in a bank account, then you might want to spend the time and money you are planning for school working at or starting your own web company. If you work at a web company you would have to start at the bottom, but you would be learning the skills required to be a web programmer in situ and saving the large pile of money that going to college would require. If you start your own company, then you would get the entire experience of what is required to run a web company. Each of these two would focus your time, money, and attention on what you really want to do. If you go to college you will be learning a lot of things that are good for background information, but might not help you will web programming skills.

Answer 3

Speaking as both a graduate (engineering but that's incidental) and someone who hires programmers.

1) I tend to think of Maths as purer and Engineering as more applied. If it's the web you're really interested in then it's very much an applied field BUT as a recruiter I wouldn't care. Your degree is purely a mark of intelligence and application rather than anything significantly more. When you start working you'll be amazed how little of it you actually use. In terms of specific skills I'd likely be as impressed by the weekends you spent learning PERL/Ruby/.NET as the stuff you might have learned at school.

2) Following on from that unless it's directly applicable to the job you're looking for the degree itself is potentially irrelevant and often it's the school/college/university which will open more doors. Even if school 2 has a better reputation for the specific subject than school 1, that will be lost on most recruiters and managers who will just see the name.

3) The likely reason that school 1 is aligned with the finance industry is that the finance industry like schools recognised as reputable. It's more about the finance industry liking the school than the school liking the finance industry so don't worry about it.

4) You're still young and may well change your mind between now and when you graduate so try not to focus too much on what you think you want to do now. Think about what gives you the best options.

5) Think about which school you'll be happier at - location, fellow students, course content, accommodation, everything. If you're not happy you won't thrive, if you don't thrive you'll under achieve (and you'll be wasting a couple of years).

On balance I'd say go to the better school but ONLY if you think you'll be happy there. Point 5 really is the most important thing.

Answer 4

Well, I don't even know what schools you're talking about and I'm not sure exactly how you are using engineering. Computer Engineering is very related to Computer Science but you'd be emphasizing a lot more hardware related issues. It is sort of a blend of EE and CS. This is a great simplification. Nevertheless, my field is CS and mathematics plays an integral role throughout the field. How is this School1 aligned with the financial industry? I don't know of any universities. In fact, I don't know of any CS graduate programs that aren't "math oriented." What do you mean by that exactly? You will need a good background in mathematics. However, this is not the same as what you'd do in a mathematics graduate program where you'd focus on, say, problems in pure Number Theory.

Anyway, to answer your other questions. The reputation of a school as a whole is not very interesting (unless it is Harvard or Princeton and you just want to say you went to a well known school) rather the repuation of the DEPARTMENT is what you're after. To be honest, even then, what you'd really like is to have the right advisor or major professor. You could go to a small Directional School with a very well known, prestigious professor as your advisor. Admittedly, this is less important probably for a Masters student than for a PhD but nevertheless this is my advice.

Secondly, as I alluded earlier, I think you are misunderstanding the role of mathematics in CS and CE. What is your goal at graduate school? Keep in mind, grad school is not the place to go to learn the latest Web framework or something like that. It's more where you'd go to invent the next paradigm from which new frameworks may be built. If you're planning to go to a terminal Masters program and you aren't there just to get another entry on your CV then you are really there to get a more sophisticated understanding of the current state of CS/CE. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd even go to grad school for a Masters if the end goal was to work in Web development. But that's just a personal choice. Probably, once you get to grad school you'll have a better idea of how it all works.

The best advice I can offer you is to to forego concern about reputation of the school or department and go to the Faculty page of each program and try to get an idea of who you'd like to work with. I recommend you doing a Thesis based Masters as that would give you a better opportunity to continue in graduate school if you chooce. As well, it is more interesting if you have some published work than if you'd just competed 12 more courses.

Answer 5

I think you need to balance two parts:

1 - brand recognition of colleges - the source of the degree gets you past the first round of recruiting. Generally, most companies based the list of good schools on the success they've had with previous candidates.

2 - getting the education you want - the door may be open from your school, but if you don't have the knowledge to back it up you probably won't pull in that first job offer. So picking a school with a good web program - if you want to work on web industry products - is just as important. Or else, plan to supplement your education with independant web research.

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To answer the questions:

What do other people think is more important based on their experiences?

The skill set you learn. I have trouble justifying a school that doesn't give you the education you want. No matter how awesome the rep of the school is, it's your time and your money and if you don't like the education you'll get there, it's not worth it.

Has anyone here studied in a math-oriented graduate program? If so, what are you working on now?

I have a B.S. in Computational Mathematics, and a M.S. in Computer Science. The CS degree was from a college with the tech school model. I find both useful. The math degree taught me how to look at problems in many different ways. The CS degree taught me how to get stuff done. I'd say I use both, but the direct application of mathematical topics is less obvious.

Is school reputation in the workplace more important than the focus of the program?

Not more important, but possibly equally important.

To those who hire developers - what would you prefer?

This is a tricky question. Hiring practices can vary widely across companies. Working from the enormous, faceless institution model:

• The source of the degree and your GPA gets you through HR. Hiring managers may never see your resume without a first pass from HR.

• Showing you are smart and get things done should get you through the hiring manager/interview process. This is where your ability to talk about the technical domain will really factor in. A math-based program should not be a detriment here - even if your school didn't cover web topics, self-research and demonstration of hands on knowledge should be enough to get you through.

The thing that wouldn't fly would be coming to a web job interview and saying "I didn't learn it in school, so I don't know..." That's not good, since in a year or two, every technology the school taught could be obsolete, and you'd need to self-educate anyway. Better to be able to say "I chose a math-based program to get a solid understanding of the fundamentals, but then I used technology X, Y, Z in my own personal projects". That's an impressive answer and something that will make managers take note in a good way.

What is the difference in how math and engineering programs are considered in academic circles?

Can't say. I've so completely avoided academic circles.

Have you tried a background check on the hiring profile of candidates? Particularly from school #2? Can they give you a list of companies that have hired recent grads? It might also help to look at social networking sites (like LinkedIn) to see an independant source for what grads are doing now. It might even let you contact alumni to get a sense of what they felt was good or bad about their educations.

Answer 6

I'd go for breadth rather than depth (additional depth to areas you already know, rather than breadth, seems to come more easily in the working world) and pick a formal education that best complements what you feel you can learn on your own.

However, if you visit both schools and there's a big difference in that one of them you can relate to the profs/classes/projects much more than the other, I'd pick the former -- make sure you can engage with your environment. Feeling lost and isolated in an academic setting is really a bummer, and was a huge barrier to some of my colleagues when I was in graduate school.

Answer 7

I spent 5 years as a grad student studying quantum computing in a computer science department and have been a professional coder for 2 years now. Hands down I say you should go with the programs / professor that is involved in research that will take you somewhere you want to go. The bottom line is: you want to be a web developer, make sure you are always doing something that will take you towards that goal unless your goals change.

Generally when you go to grad school you become a student of a professor so I'll assume you are really choosing between 2 profs. Some questions to ask yourself about them are:

• are they doing research you are interested in?
• do you think that research is applicable in industry?
• will you be learning things and using technologies that will be useful as a web developer?
• are they very active in their research area? If they are not that is a bad sign.
• is the their research area active? Another bad sign if not.
• how much can they pay you? You may have to prove yourself first, but if you do will they have money to pay you with?

Then ask yourself similar questions about the departments.

Try to hammer down your information into usable "facts", the distinction between "math based" and "engineering based" is far too subjective to make decisions on.

As for the reputations of the schools and math vs. engineering, ignore it, unless the higher rep school is one of the top 10 tech schools in the world: MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Waterloo.... Having one of those schools on your resume will make a difference but otherwise forget about it. How the profs / programs fit your goals, your performance and your knowledge when you come out are what matter. That said I have to add that having 5 years of quantum computing on my resume does add some wow factor but it just gets me in the door, my knowledge and skill as a developer are what pass the interviews.

Answer 8

For me I didn't study anything computer oriented in school. I went to Cal State Google and UC Amazon (self taught by reading). This hasn't stopped me at all. I make well into a 6 figure income and don't have a BS in anything! Now having said that, I recently interviewed at Microsoft and found that I would have been able to get that job had I gone through a normal computer science path. They were mostly interested in algorithms and data structures. This is something that one never comes across in the "web industry". I have worked for some pretty big web properties and never once needed something I didn't already know or couldn't easily find on Google!

• What do other people think is more important based on their experiences? I think that showing a track record of being able to get things done is more important to most people than the form education. I spent 4 years in the military. Most of it was spent in Ranger battalion. This impresses many people a lot more than the formal education! Know how to get things done. Know when you don't know something and be ok with telling people that you don't know it. Then follow it up with "but I can quickly find out ????". Know how to use Google.
• Has anyone here studied in a
  math-oriented graduate program? If
  so, what are you working on now? Not me.
• Is school reputation in the workplace more important than the focus of the program? The individuals knowledge and method of acquiring information is most important to me. People skills are also very important. I would rather someone that is nice and able to learn things rather than someone that knows everything and can't get along with any one.
• To those who hire developers what would you prefer? I would never hire someone fresh out of college vs. someone that has spent time learning what they are interested in. I want the guy that works for 30 hours trying to figure out a problem because it is there passion over someone seeking a career that is inline with their education!
• What is the difference in how math and engineering programs are considered in academic circles? N/A

Now having said all of the above. I just enrolled at the local college to transfer all of my previous credits. I have reached a point in my career where I need my education so that I can start to do bigger and better things. It took me 10 years before I felt that I really needed this. I am planning on getting a degree in computer science, mathematics, and mechanical engineering. I am to a point where I need the formal education so that I can get into things that peek my interest such as robotics, AI, physics engines, etc.

Game programming!