I'm at DePaul for the MSCS, (just got home from Systems II final) finished most of the intro classes (last one in summer). I'm enjoying it. It is pretty challenging and time consuming. Some profs have been good, 1 was pretty terrible, and 1 was marginally above terrible. I like that there is not a lot of theory, and most of what you learn is applicable to something someone might be doing in a job somewhere. It has a focus on java, a language which I have come to enjoy, but there are a few systems classes that throw you into C. I enjoy my classmates, I find the ones I'm around are smart and hard working, contrary to OPs claims that a significant amount of people were wasting their parents money. I have a small internship this summer, I'm pretty optimistic about the job market for the skills we are getting. I really like the fact that they record all the lectures, and you can watch them back whenever and however you want. There are individual screens for what's written on the whiteboard, and what's on the prof's computer screen, and you can switch around them at will. You can get the degree completely online if that's your thing. Professors are willing to help during office hours... some of them are really smart people but honestly don't have a clue how to teach on a students level. Some of the classrooms have sucked so far which is honestly annoying to me considering what we pay. With the tuition we pay I think we deserve a little better than putting our intro classes in the law building in rooms that have 2 power outlets for computer science students. No joke, the Systems II class I was in this spring had the old school desks in a random room. Pretty awkward for you/your laptop.

Overall, I'm enjoying it and I'm enjoying learning CS here. The fact that they have the intro classes that allow me to get a MSCS when I didn't have a CS undergrad, and also the being able to playback any class at any time, and being able to take any/all of the classes online is really nice and probably the best things about the program to me.

Codeacademy is good to get an idea of what you'd be doing all day. If you want to get a jump on the program, start learning Java and C.

Am I still the only one who thinks self-study and learning on the job is the way to go? I just studied some stuff in my free-time and recently landed a PHP gig. Using treehouse, tuts, books, free online resources, etc costed me less than a couple hundred bucks total.

i don't have an opinion (nor am i qualified to have one) on the matter but i do have some questions if you don't mind.

roughly how much time did you invest, and over what period of time? how did you find your job and what does it pay? can you work remotely?

Thanks for your reply! If you don't mind, could you elaborate a bit on how you feel CDM MSCS graduates fare in terms of their job marketability? Does the program seem saturated or do most of your classmates appear to be there by merit? I read the Go_Blue landed six job interviews but I am tempted to say that his prior work experience played a bit of role in his job hunting success.

pretty hard to say definitively at this point. we are all just finishing the intro classes now. most summer internships stop taking applications around the beginning of the new year, at which point we had close to nothing to show, so I think most of us are targetting summer of 2015. I literally threw some stuff up on linkedin and a software architect nearby contacted me (thinking I had already graduated) but I ended up creating an internship this summer out of that. So if the first person that has contaced me in the industry wants to give me work, even if its unpaid initially I figure thats a good sign. Theres a fairly strong belief among us that we will get jobs. I would suggest you look at the depaul 2013 career outcomes pdf. I would link you to it but I am on my phone right now so just google it. I believe it says that of the people that graduated MSCS, 97% had a job in CS and that they also had the highest starting salaries of the CDM majors. Now, I assume they have some ability to mislead with the numbers used in that pdf, but not a ton.

I'd still love to hear your thoughts on the internship and where you are at now in terms of your career change to comp sci.

Oh come on, that's not fair of you to say. I've had countless good things to say about my experience in the program; but, it seems like you've exaggerated anything negative I've had to say and retained it.

Anyway good luck to you Fantaz, I really do think things will work out for you as long as you're constantly pushing yourself to get better. Don't just go through the motions of taking classes and getting a degree. Always be thinking of side projects in which you can apply what you're learning, and watch lectures about the stuff that interests you (there's a lot of great stuff on YouTube).

That wasn't a criticism at all dude. Were around different people and observe different things. I appreciate EVERYTHING you have had to offer, obviously. Simply made a point that I havent noticed anyone who seemed to be lighting money on fire.

My biggest complaint to date is that for many of the foundation (ie required) courses, there is only 1 teacher for each class. For example, I think 2 of the teachers I had in the foundation phase were steaming piles, but I literally HAVE to take the class with them, and so do friends so I cannot ward them away. They need more teacher selection.

Ugh.. yeah. On a similar note, I wish they would offer all the courses each quarter. if you really want to take a certain class, it may not be offered the quarter you want it, and I am also not aware of a way to figure out when it will be offered in the future.

I believe if you go into your planner section on campus connect, you can click on what classes satisfy what requirements, and next to each class itll show what quarters its offered for the next year

Any of you guys taking it remotely far away from the university? I feel like the main benefits of going to school is that it has a strong local presence amongst the business community along with availibility of network connections.

So with that, do you guys think people who attend class purely online and outside of state feel that they are at a disadvantage?

You definitely lose any chance for a local internship. Still, you can network a bit thanks to all the social networking sites that exist. Make a study group on FB, share & collaborate on guides on google docs, etc

What books and other resources did you guys use to learn computer systems?

youtube

So I got into CDM at DePaul. Thanks to this thread and to everyone who provided me their valuable insight. Now I have to make the tough decision of dropping out of pharmacy school or not. I am uncertain of my personal intelligence and I think this uncertainty is what's preventing me to easily commit to CS. I had a somewhat rough experience with engineering which sort of made me "retreat" to pharmacy, but I did do well in the C++ course I had to take.

Essentially, I'm forfeiting my chances at a moderately safe, well-paying doctorate degree for a risky attempt at a master's degree that I think would provide me with a more enjoyable career, lifestyle, and also, self-fulfillment. I dislike pharmacy, but is it enough to warrant this career change? Am I well-informed enough about CS to pursue it?

Could anyone give this pharmacy student a dose of reality?

Pretty sure pharmacy will be a little more stable/predictable. I've been in the software development field for a while and things change. Your skill set can become obsolete in a relatively short period of time. You'll probably have to be upgrading your skill set often.

I dont know a ton about pharmacy, but I recall reading a while back itll be less and less stable due to everyone coming in to do it as an "easy" 100k year job. If you know how to program, youll always find work imo. So Im not sure underselling software dev, and upselling pharmacy in terms of stability is correct.

On your topic, I guess it depends on your life view. My opinion is you saying you dislike what you currently do is the answer already. I also think you need to just suck up the time sink, and try some of the CDM courses while still in pharmacy school (assuming thats possible). Do you have to take the pre req courses or did you test out?

Underselling software development?

Language Popularity Chart

If you don't think you'll have to be constantly diligent in staying current with technological progress in software development you are sadly mistaken my friend. I invite you to go back 20 years ago and look at the state of the art in computer technology. If you think progress is slowing we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Overselling pharmacy? Go read my post again because you are just wrong.

I found this article to be fairly accurate:

20 years ago vs. Now in Software Development

Quote:

I enjoy the process of developing software, which includes many various activities. But learning and teaching new software are the two activities I enjoy the most. During my 30-year career I’ve been working as an independent contractor, taught countless training classes, prepared and read hundred of resumes, co-founded a couple of startups. You might be thinking that now a grouchy old programmer will start complaining that young software developers don’t know how to program? Don’t be. It’s all the way around.
The skills required today for getting a Software Developer job are different than in the nineties. I’m not even talking about programming languages that were popular then and now. The mere number of different languages, tools, frameworks, and platforms that must be present on a resume today is piling up. It’s more difficult to become a competitive software developer in the USA today than it was 20 years ago.
Back then, to get a job you’d need to know a programming language to develop UI and SQL for data persistence. Knowing stored procedures for a popular RDBMS like Oracle, Sybase, or MS SQL Server would help. This is it. The resume having Visual Basic plus MS SQL Server or PowerBuilder and Oracle would easily get you a job. Of course, you’d need to know them well. If you knew Unix shell programming (OMG!), you’d be getting several job offers in a heart beat.
Mid nineties. Do you know how to handle a Click Event on a button in Visual Basic and how to write an SQL statement that would find duplicates in a database table? You’re hired!
In the second part of the nineties people who knew how to spell COBOL and CICS – would be getting multiple offers because of that Y2K FUD.
The year 2000. The world survived the Y2K craze. Legions of musicians, cab drivers and civil engineers became software developers, and most of them were able to retain their well paying jobs. You know Java and EJB? Really? How much do you want to make an hour? $100. You got it.
Knowing HTML or JavaScript was not an asset – easy peasy and not serious.
The year 2014. Unless you have ten different technologies on your resume, do not even submit it to us. Got 9? Are you just out of college or something?
If you want to stay in business of software development, you need to continue studying. Non stop. Lots of different tools, frameworks, languages. I’ll give you an example. Take a look at the program of our 10-week online training “Modern Web Development for Java Developers”. It’s a very intensive training with lots of self studying. Just check the time lines of the first two lessons. It’s a lot to master even for programmers who already have working knowledge of Java.
Here’s a fragment from an email I’ve received from an programmer with 20 years experience who enrolled in one of there trainings:
“I signed up for your Web Development for Java developers course. Looking at the outline. Should attendees do some preparations like install any software and play with it? The other day I went to an HTML5 meetup and was shocked – for more than an hour people were downloading and installing some software – Git, Node JS, Karma, Grunt, Bower. I got overwhelmed and left.“
I feel your pain, buddy. I really do. Got to stay in good shape to compete with the young generation. These kids were born with smart phones in their hands and Facebook in their brains. They easily multi-task. They absorb new materials like sponges. You got years of industry experience behind your belt? This is nice, but they need people who feel comfortable programming for the Bring-Your-Own-Device world. It’s time to replace your Windows XP desktop with several modern devices and get back to school. Otherwise become a manager. Well, you need to get back to school in this case too.

Thanks for your response. I haven't submitted my intent to enroll just yet, but I most probably have to take the pre req courses given my background. To my understanding, that would take me ~3 years to finish the whole program, correct?

This is what other people have been telling me as well. The more I reflect on this point, the more it comforts me into committing to the change.

I am definitely checking to see if this route is possible. How much time do you spend studying for your courses if you don't mind me asking? How is the workload?

Okey Dokey

Depends mostly on the course load you take on. When its all said and done, it will have taken me about 3 years and 3 months to finish, including the pre-req. A couple things to note here are that initially I took extra unneccessary courses just to gain some extra knowledge/experience, and I have been working full time the last 1 1/2 years, so I have slowed down quite a bit. Most people I know take 8 hours a quarter and the program itself is 52 hours, plus 20-24 hours for the pre-req phase. Thats 76 hours, so that should help somewhat lay out how long things would take. If you're not working, I think 12 hours a quarter is possible ( I did 12 twice), but I tend to stick to 4-8 nowadays.

At the point Im at, I spend a lot of time. Lectures themselves are 3 1/2 hours a week, so thats 7 hours if you take 2 course, then probably 10-20 hours a week per class, usually leaning more on the lower side of that spectrum. Also to add, foundational classes tend to have near weekly homework, usually a bigger project of some sort, and 1-2 tests. The pre-req classes had homework, sometimes only once every 3 weeks or so though, much less reading needed, and typically 2 tests.

Also note, the pre-req phase is a good feel out process, and requires much less work. The java 1 and java 2 classes would be good gauges I think to start to shape if you are ready for it (If you did well in C++, these should be a breeze). I spent probably an hour a week max on those classes. Truthfully I dont think I spent as much time as most on the pre-req classes, but that time sort of rapidly expanded once I started working and got into the foundational classes.

Are you currently working?

SimplyHired.com

1 - 10 of 22,290 pharmacist job

1 - 10 of 758,316 software engineer jobs

ya, I'll take CSC. You could add in web developer, and software developer. Not sure what other job titles you could add in for pharmacists, even if you came up with some, its pretty damn safe to say your likelyhood of getting and keeping a job is orders of magnitude greater in CSC. The job numbers for computer scientists utterly dwarfs pharma, which is no shame, since it utterly dwarfs most other industries also.

I'm self-employed to an extent, but I'm currently not working any traditional 9 to 5 job. I would probably not work until after the prereq phase, or until I feel comfortable enough with the workload. But, based on what you've said, it sounds manageable. Unlike OP, I don't have much familial responsibilities, so I think I'm in a good position to focus purely on academics until I develop a decent skill set to apply for an entry level CS-related job.

To what extent does DePaul allow students to be part-time? Is there a minimum to how many classes you can take a quarter? Sorry for bombarding you with questions I should probably be asking an advisor. I'm planning on taking a trip to DePaul early next week.

Pretty reassuring. With the amount of new pharmacy schools opening up, and the number of older pharmacists unwilling to retire, I just don't expect pharmacy to significantly grow beyond what it is now.

Do an update OP