In this video, I will talk about my experience after being a student in the OMSCS program for about five years. I will end this video by outlining some of the important lessons that I have learned and how the program has impacted my career.

I have to start this video by telling you that getting a master’s degree is not the most important thing if you want to advance your career. Many people have advanced far in their tech career without having a master’s degree. So if you plan to enroll thinking you will get a promotion, I have to let you know that you might need to re-evaluate your objective. It’s hard for me to know why other people have chosen to get their master’s degree, but I can explain my reasoning for going through the program.

For me, I enrolled because I was stuck in a job that I did not like and was not able to leave the job because of my immigration status. When I came to the USA, I was an international student. After I finished my undergraduate program, I got a job offer that promised me to apply for my green card. At that time, this was a great deal that was worth more than money.

You see, when you are a foreigner in the U.S.A and you don’t have a permanent resident status, a lot of things get exponentially harder. For example, if you need to take a loan to get a car, it’s difficult; if you need a mortgage, it’s difficult. So, having the opportunity to get a green card applied for me by a reputable company was a great move for me. The problem that I found myself in was that the role I was in did not involve writing code as the center of the job. I was a production engineer (SRE, Support Engineer). When I got the job, I was not sure what it entailed because it was my first real job after my internship at another company. After being in the role for about nine months, I kept on spending more time dealing with production issues instead of writing computer code, to a point where my job was spent being on an outage call 24/7. Initially, I did not mind it, but I really missed sitting down in peace and writing code. Also, I was not able to switch jobs because the company had started my green card process.

The thing that pushed me to apply was the difficulty that I was having to clear internal pure software engineer interviews at the same company. By that time, I was a senior engineer, and no other team would take a chance with me at the same level because I had not been consistently coding. Since I could not leave my position and I was miserable, I was left with only a few choices. The best choice for me was to apply to a master’s degree program and use that program as a way to level up my development skills and learn new stuff.

As I started in the OMSCS program, even though my undergraduate was in computer science, I struggled in the program. This makes sense because programming is one of those things that you have to consistently do if you want to be fluent at it. By the time I was taking my third class, I was confident enough in my programming skills to apply for a new internal position. I was able to get a new position where most of my focus was to write code in Golang. So, in a sense, I could say that the problem was solved for me because I reached the goal that I had in mind. But I still had seven more classes to take.

Now that I am about to finish, I can say that the most important skills that I have gained from the program have nothing to do with my ability to write code. For me, I feel that the program has improved my communication skills. This may sound counterintuitive, but past a certain level, my development skills won’t matter.

When working in a corporation, communication is more valuable than being able to implement a solution. To give you a concrete example, because I have taken many courses in computer networking, even though I am not a network engineer, I am able to fluently communicate with a network engineer about my problem, and they can go ahead and implement a solution for me. Also, because now I have a deeper understanding of operating systems, I can easily communicate a solution that might not have come to mind without a deep knowledge. It seems that at the end of the day, the ability to communicate technical information to different people is a valuable skill.

So, for someone like me, where English is not my first language and I lack many communication skills that I could have acquired if I grew up here, I feel the program helped me bridge that gap. In the program, you have to work with teams that are distributed across the globe, and most of your teammates are probably as smart as you are. The biggest roadblock is usually communicating with other people and coming to a compromise when working on a team project. Those are skills that employers really value. I feel that this is way more valuable than the ability to write great computer code.

So, if you plan to enroll anytime soon, I hope this video gives you some perspective on the reasons why you should enroll. If you are already good at communicating technical information, maybe you should consider something else. But if you are like me and struggle with communication, then I guarantee that by the end of the program, you will be able to express your thoughts with ease and be able to talk to other engineers in a way they could easily understand you.

I hope this essay was helpful to you. Thank you for watching, and I will see you next time.