CAREER DILEMMA (BS in CS or MS in CS) ??? 2

[microfocus]

Hello tech friends! I need your advice. The following is my background:

I have recently made a career change from Accounting to computer programming. I hold a Bachelor's in Accounting and an Associate in Computer Information Systems. I worked as an accountant for 7 years after college. I became bored with Accounting and wanted to put into work my Associate degree in Computer Information Systems and decided to challenge myself by jumping into a computer programmer position. In my new job, I will be doing Cobol, Access and Oracle. One of the problems is that I don't know anything about Oracle and took classes in Cobol and Access a long time ago in college. In addition, my new employer is not willing to train, so I have to learn the bulk of the work by myself.

Needless to say, I want to go back to school to freshen up and perhaps pursue a degree. Since, I already have a Bachelor's in Accounting, I am eligible to enter a Master's in Computer Science program. What do you guys suggest go for the Master's or Bachelor's in Computer Science???

 

[meadandale]

Go for the Master's.

I was in a similar position. I have a B.A. in Chemistry and applied to the graduate program at UCSD in CS. As I was underprepared for the MS classes, I spent a year taking undergraduate classes. I suppose I could have done a second bachelors but why? The MS has better wow factor than a second BS.

 

[microfocus]

Thank you Meadandale. I was just worried about the degree of difficulty of the Master's vs the Bachelor's. What kind of programming are you doing? Did the Master's help in doing your job or did your job give you extensive training?

 

[meadandale]

The Masters classes are definitely more difficult. They tend to be more 'project oriented' and involve alot of critical reading (i.e. reading research papers and evaluating them) as well as more in depth coverage of topics that are covered as an undergraduate. For example, although undergrads CS majors cover computer architecture, our graduate class took it alot further, comparing and contrasting the more complicated aspects of chip architecture design such as pipelining and ILP (instruction level parallelism).

Before I started the program, I had never even heard of most of this stuff. That's why I found myself taking some 'preparatory' classes and doing alot of self study in computer architecture and discrete math among other things because I didn't have the time to take many of the courses I needed exposure to.

Currently, I am doing mostly Java programming but I occasionally do C++ or C applications and have a bit of experience doing Unix shell scripting.

I got involved in development kind of serendipitously. I had only taken one Java course and a brutal course in OOP with data structures and algorithms as well as an advanced data structures class when I got my first programming job. I learned alot on the job and have done alot on my own (via self study and test development) to learn new concepts. For instance, I was trying to learn some server side programming in Java so I wrote a GuestBook application from scratch so I could learn some of the ins and outs of server side Java development. I've found that simply reading it in a book isn't sufficient. You have to actually struggle through putting it to use to actually have the material sink in.

You can check out the Guestbook app on my website:

http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/chudak

I also created the image swapping applet to fix a cron based shell script that I was using to change the image every hour.

It has been a grind but it is well worth it. I'll be very happy when I finally get my thesis finished and graduate.

Regards,

Charles

 

[nontrad]

I have a BS business also - but old and unused. I have decided to go and get the BS and MS in CS,. At my university, the MS is primarily in-depth theory and the BS was more of the hands-on/applications type courses.

At this university, a 2nd BS does not require all the usual elective courses - just 30 SH in CS courses plus anything else that is a requirement for the degree (like a Poly Sci class for all IL public univ undergrads) . None of that Mythology 101 stuff again.

The starting salary for the MS students is higher BUT I've noticed that a LOT of them without a BSCS degree had to take so many additional courses because they did not have the CS background that they might as well have taken both the BS and MS path anyway.

E.