Slashdot Mirror
Master of Software Engineering: CMU or Elsewhere?
nestea247 asks: "I graduated from CMU 3 years ago and have since worked in a very good company and gained quite a lot of solid software development experiences. Now I'm thinking of moving on, to learn more about software engineering i.e. management/methods/processes. CMU has a very good program. I have been comparing it against other schools like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley...etc., and it seems like only CMU has very specific concentration on software engineering and a tailor-made cirriculum. Other schools are just general masters degree in CS that might require me to re-learn or polish a lot of concepts in undergrad. So CMU sounds like a good choice, but I hope if someone could tell me what's good about the other schools. What should I take into consideration (academically) when I select a grad school for MSE?"
I remember seeing a $300 paperback SE book in the CMU bookstore. I hope you're ready to shell out.
I love CMU as a college, but SE looks kind of boring. Perhaps it's just me. Mostly learning management and workflow models, from what I saw skimming the textbook.
Ironically enough, I've been more impressed with the little I've seen of CMU's Graduate School of Industrial Engineering.
Also, if you come back to CMU again, you'll be without an NNTP feed. Damn CMU's IT people and their stupid bboards (godawful extension to IMAP, if anyone wants to know what they are...CMU gateways USENET through them).
Anyway, your call.
As an interesting aside, I've read that masters students generally end up making less money over their lifetime than BSers that would have invested the money they would have spent on their education. This is an on-average thing over the past ten years or something similar.
May we never see th
From what I recall, RIT created the first degree program specializing in software engineering. I knew a few people who were in the first graduating class (undergrad) a few years back. I was absolutely amazed by how good of programmers/designers they were.
Throughout their 5 year program, they are required to spend something like 3 semesters doing internships. My company hired one of them during their first internship period. Next time around, he hired every one that would accept the position.
Definately worth checking out.
Well, I must say that I'm a bit taken aback by some of the comments here. Even for /. it seems that even the posters with something rational to say are resorting to name calling. Personally I think it's great that you're furthering your education and in something as important as software engineering. The number of comments here whining about how S.E. practices are nothing more than PHB mumbo-jumbo really demostrates to me why the general state of software today is as deplorable as it is. Listen people: if you look at the most reliable and (if appropriate) secure systems ever created, like Multics (which there was a story about, eariler today on /.) or the Space Shuttle on-board control software, you'll see that all of those teams used extremely rigorus software engineering processes. I think the main problem that people have had with software engineering is that it's being spouted off by PHBs with business degrees or yahoos who think they can learn all there is to know from a book. Well, you can't. It requires experience.
I'm getting off my rant here and to my real point. I'm currently in the grad program at UC Davis. (My employeer pays for it while I continue to work full time & collect a normal paycheck, I wouldn't recommend any other way.) Let me tell you: graduate school is not like your undergrad days. Sure, there's classwork and homework, but you're expected to work on projects of real significance. None of this, "Write a program to do X and make sure you get the same results as me." It may not be the same as the experience you get working on a real product, but then I question the utility of many experiences in the "real world."
So, to finally answer your question, I found that the core ciriculum of my graduate program really helped to either fill in holes from my undergraduate ciriculum (from Purdue, also in CS), and helped reinforce ideas that I had all but forgotten about. As an undergrad we take 4-6 classes a term, and we get hammered with work. While I did my best to actually learn the material (as opposed to cramming), I found that having it again as a grad student (where you only have a couple courses a term, so there's more time to study ideas in depth), was rather refreshing. I think some of this benefit came from going to a different school from where I did my undergrad. So while I have nothing but respect for CMU and the SEI (I have to say that, my boss went to CMU :-) , I would advise you to not reject schools simplily because they don't have a "Masters of Software Engineering" degree (do ensure that they have a strong software enginnering concentration though), and look at different schools, if for no other reason than to expand your horizons beyond the CMU mindset and any unnecessary overlap they may have between their undergraduate and graduate ciriculum (one of my classmates at Davis also did his undergrad there, and he found the repetition useless, especially since he was getting the same profs for the core subjects).
Hope this helps!
-"Zow"