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The Update, Without The Update
Publish: 2024-06-14 20:15:36
Categories: grad school

It's been a minute. How's it going? 🙂

Me? I'm good, thanks.

So, "what's been going on?", amiright? When we last left off, our friends at the University of Washington (UW) offered me a spot, almost guaranteeing my decision (right?).

So how come there hasn't been a post to make it official? Well... let's discuss.

Yes, Let's Discuss

Prior to UW's offer, University of Michigan - Dearborn (UoM) had become the obvious front runner, mainly on the strength and flexibility of their program. I can't stress enough how good their program looks. Add to this UoM's overall good communication and general experience throughout the process, it was easy to place them in the #1 spot after Minnesota told me to fuck off.

Now, to be honest, I was very excited when UW offered me a spot. They're local, their program is 1.5 years (versus that normal 2 years MS program), and UW is one of the top public universities in the country. Genuinely, accepting UW's offer seemed so obvious that it was silly to consider not accepting.

"Seemed".

While UW, as a university is a well-ranked institution, it's not necessarily true that all their programs are awesome. And, the more I looked into it, the less sense it made to choose UW.

I'm Judging You

I've talked a couple of times now about researching programs and whatnot, but let's be clear, by & large it's a shit show. What am I doing? I'm going to DuckDuckGo and I'm googling "Top MSDS programs 2024", "Best Data Science graduate research programs 2024", and shit like that. Then, I'm reading.

I mean, it's exactly what you'd expect, but the point I'm trying to make here is that there are no 'official' reviews or rankings. There are some big names review sitesthat offer up their opinions, like Fortune, Forbes and US News - all of which have multiple lists of program rankings. And then, there's a bunch of other sites to read.

So anyway, I read a bunch of these sites, and I would see certain Data Science programs pop up over and over. Never once did I see anyone mention UW. Not once. Should I be concerned?

Interweb articles are fine as a first pass, but now that I'm in the top 2 ( 😉 ), I'm able to take the time to look deeper into the programs themselves, and try to judge them by their merits and not their reputations. So I've been looking deeper. And, again, UW seems to fall behind.

UW has a very rigid program. Officially it's a fixed curriculum, although their is an option to swap out up to two courses. However, for each one, you have to write up an official request with justification as to why a) you feel you can skip the course you want to skip and b) you will benefit from taking the alternate course. Compare this to UoM that gives you a pool of core courses with a some flexibility and a set of elective courses with a lot of flexibility. Again, UW is looking like the less attractive option. Should I be concerned?

Digging deeper, from what I can tell, UW's program does a good job of covering all of the basics, but fails to get into any serious depth when it comes to specializing with Data Science. This was reinforced during a Zoom "Open House" that UW sponsored to welcome the upcoming MSDS class, answer questions and set up next steps. During the session, as they described the program, they mentioned that it was more of an "applied data science program", than a theoretical one. Should I be concerned?

So UW isn't looking like such a slam dunk. "What about costs?" you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked, let's compare the two programs estimated cost of tuition:
UW UoM
$53,000 😮 $21,000

I know... right? I mean, I should be concerned by now, right?

Enter The Dark Horse

So, the more I'm researching the harder it is to see Washington being the place to be. That's from a purely academic perspective. There are several other reasons to argue for leaving the area as well, but this post is too long as is, maybe we'll chat about it some other time. Needless to say, UoM seems to have successfully defended the throne.

Well, as I'm researching all of this... guess who show's up? CUNY, the City University of New York, returned their decision and I was accepted to that program as well! 😀

Now, time can change things, can't it? Back in Next Steps I talked about my CUNY prospects as such:

CUNY - sure, maybe. The big cool factor here is that I'd get to go "back" to New York. That's nice, but that's about it.

Honestly CUNY was one of my flyers. 🙂 But after losing Minnesota, and (almost for sure) dropping UW, things have really changed. CUNY is a reasonably close second to UoM's Data Science program while offering a life opportunity that is calling to me more and more as I consider the two options.

I didn't expect it, but CUNY is not only in the race... but this dark horse may have joined the race in first place!

Ooof... so... more research. 🙂

So here's the deal, I'll keep this one short: CUNY has a good program. It's well-rated, it's well-organized and is more relevant than UW seemed. There's flexibility built into the curriculum via electives, though it doesn't have the breadth of UoM's program.

How about cost?
UW UoM CUNY
$53,000 😮 $21,000 $23,000

So... ignoring cost of living for a few seconds, academically UoM and CUNY are identical here.

Are you seeing why I haven't updated you guys in 6 weeks? 😂 This shit isn't obvious! But we gotta decide, don't we? Time's tick-tick-ticking.

The East Is the Seed!

UoM has the best program offering. Clearly. CUNY's is still good though. Genuinely, I think I'd be happy with either program.

But what my life would look like is drastically different. UoM offers a suburban, easily-affordable life that includes a budget that's fairly easy to swallow. CUNY offers two years in NYC on a very-tight budget, grittier lifestyle (public transport, smaller apartment, few amenities, etc.)... but with much more interesting possibilities vis a vis life experience .

It's going to warrant it's own post, but for now, I'll say that the decision has kind of made itself. As of now, I'm trying to see if I can make CUNY work. 🙂 🙂 🙂 It's not official yet, and there's more to share, but I did want to post something after 6 weeks of silence.

So, yeah, I'm not yet sure I can make it work. I'm trying to figure out housing, and it's looking like I may have to sell my car if I did move to NYC... which, I don't know, it's a sacrifice I wasn't ready for, so let's see how that affects things.

I'm really running out of time to decide and act. A decision is coming either way. Once I know, you'll know. 🙂

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