MCIT — Spring 2024-Spring 2025— Review

Posting a last review of the remaining 4 credits I needed to finish the program. I took a bunch of 0.5 credit courses and was a pilot student or early student for many of them. I was already doing SWE work in summer of 2024 so I wanted to take some lighter classes and just get this program done. My memory for some of these courses is a bit vague since its been over a year since I took them

CIT 521: Artificial Intelligence

Overall: 5/10, Spring 2024

First half of course was all algorithms. I enjoyed this part since it was mostly just variations of DFS and BFS algorithms like A*, Pruning etc. Second half was brutal; this part was a lot of AI/ML stuff that was just touching the surface of things. I felt this part was pretty confusing and there was some confusing probability in here.

I ended up watching a bunch of Berkley lectures from their AI class to help

The final was ridiculously hard. No amount of studying would have prepared me. Good thing its only 15% of your grade

EAS 5850: Imaging Informatics

Overall: 9/10, Spring 2024

I was a pilot student for this class and overall really enjoyed it. I wanted to take a lighter course and something different from the usual coding stuff. The first half of the course was mainly reading/learning about codes and standards and best practices; the second half of the course was more about AI and how it affects healthcare. Some of the assignments required using python to deal with NLP stuff

Course staff were all great and I found the class to be quite interesting, even though the material was super dense. Lectures each week were long and covered a lot of material. Highly recommend this class for anyone in the program

DATS 5750: Cloud Tech Practicum (0.5 credits)

Overall: 1/10, Summer 2024 (1s half)

This class is straight up useless. The lectures/assignments just had you go through google and click through their tutorials and copy and paste code lol. Take this class if you only want to get some credits in but if you want to learn something, this isn’t it

EAS 5740: How to Use Data (0.5 credits)

Overall: 7/10, Summer 2024 (1s half)

Nice class but I barely paid attention in it. I started my internship during this time so most of the material floated through my head. The final assignment reuqired you to form a group; shoutout to my group for carrying me through it

EAS5830 : Blockchains (0.5 credits)

Overall: 1/10, Summer 2024 (2nd half)

Hoped to learn something about crypto / blockchain, but I was also lost throughout the whole course. TAs offered 0 help and they were just as lost as me

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Fall 2025 : Took this semester off to continue at my internship; on the side, I self-studied Networking and Databases (equivalent to 553 and 550 in the program) through books and CMU’s DB lectures

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EAS5830 : Technology Ethics and the Legal Landscape

Overall: 5/10, Spring 2025

My last course in the program. I was also a pilot student for this class. It covered the intersection of law, tech, and ethics. Not really my cup of tea but I wanted to take a non-coding related class. This class is all about reading, reading, and more reading. Midterms were all time and proctored writing assignments

If you care about grades, do not take this class. There is some serious grade deflation going on since everyone ended up with a high final grade, so the staff needs to ensure not everyone received an A at the end. I had an overall grade of 95% but this was matched to a B+. I guess that 5% is anything from A- to A+.

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Final thoughts: Expected the program to be better but its also what you put in. I mainly wanted to take it to learn fundamentals, not be a bootcamp grad, and have this on my resume so I pass ATS resume checks

They also raised the tuition every semester so its become incredibly expensive. Not sure if I would fully recommend this program to others anymore