A Master's In CS or a Master's In Game Programming?

Rustcycle asks: "I'm attending the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which has just announced that they are offering a Master's Degree in their Games and Media Integration (GMI) program. There is a fair amount of overlap between the GMI curriculum and the CS courses, so I'm considering a switch in degrees. If you were hiring MS grads outside the game industry for visualization work, am I worth more to you with the more specialized program or would you be more interested in me if I had more exposure? Within the gaming industry, how much does a specialized degree compel a company to hire a recent grad?"

Comments

Waste of time

[bobetov]

A Master's degree is next to worthless in CS. What impresses me when hiring is actual experience. Unless you're doing something algorithmically interesting (in which case, go math, but anyway...) most CS work is about a mindset and experience solving real problems. Theory beyond the undergrad level is superfluous.

If you have to choose, go with the game-centric one, but I'd spend two years writing games instead.

My two cents.