 I just finished my first semester of grad school in Georgia Tech's online master's computer science program and this is how I felt about it. But first I need to go on a run. Ever since the marathon that I ran, my foot's really been bugging me. I hope it's not a stress fracture, but honestly who does at this point? I actually had to take like a full six weeks off from training and I'm only just now getting back into it. We're gonna go out on them and say I think I'm good at this point, but I guess we'll see today. The goal today is six miles so if you get that, I'll be happy. Let's go. Surprisingly it felt pretty good. A screen shot up on the screen, but let's get to know what this video is actually about. But first I need to shower. Before I get into it, if you're new here my name is Josh Beasley and I'm a recent graduate from Yale University where I study computer science. Now I live out in LA where I'm active duty military and I make videos about college tech and anything else I'm interested in. If you're a new viewer and you gain any sort of value from this video consider subscribing and with that let's get into my thoughts on my first semester of grad school. If you're interested in checking out the specific reasons that I chose this program, I recommend checking out one of the previous videos I posted as I kind of lay out all the reasons why I was so interested in this program and why I ultimately chose to pursue the online master's computer science from Georgia Tech. Just a little bit of an intro to the program. The program consists of 10 courses each of them being three credit hours each. About half the courses are specific classes you have to take to pursue requirements for whatever field of focus you choose to pursue and the other five are electives so you can choose any other classes in the degree. For me I had originally chosen the machine learning field of focus but after looking at some of the required classes and the course reviews for some of those required classes for the focus I'm having some second thoughts still haven't completely decided on a focus yet but I definitely want to take classes that I'm going to get the most out of and right now I'm not super sure if that's within the machine learning focus or not. So I'm also looking at the interactive intelligence specialization and the other two specializations are computational perception and robotics and the last one is computing systems I believe but neither of those really interested me so that is a little overview of what the degree program actually looked like because I know some of you were curious in the comments but now let's get into the classes I actually took. One interesting thing about this program is since it's intended to be a fully online and part-time program they actually limit the number of classes you can take each semester to two. I had originally intended on taking two classes a semester but given the fact that not only was I starting grad school for the first time but I was also starting my career after my undergrad I didn't know what my schedule or workload would be looking like for either of those. I thought I would take the safer route and only choose to enroll in one class for this semester. In retrospect I definitely think I could have handled two classes this semester but taking one allowed me a lot more free time to settle into my new home and you know explore the LA area for all that it's worth and the one class that I did decide to enroll in the semester was titled Robotics for Artificial Intelligence. When choosing classes I needed to pick something that one I could actually get into because I did lowest priority when it came to choosing classes but two was kind of in the you know mean and median area when it came to workload for the classes and this kind of fit both of those bills. I had no idea what to expect going into this course but I have to say after finishing it I really did enjoy it. I think this was mainly due to the fact that it had enough overlap with some of the content that I studied in my undergrad degree that I felt comfortable but also exposed me to a bunch of new concepts as well. A lot of the class consisted of previously recorded videos and assignments and these were all put together by Dr. Sebastian Throon who was an incredibly accomplished guy you know co-founder of Udacity taught at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon so I have to say I really did enjoy the content that he put together. Then when it came to actually like the staff that you would interact with so whether that be office hours or you know answering your questions on a piazza there was another full staff and professors that handled that side of things. They were great as well but the course covered six main topics throughout the course of the semester. It started off with general histogram filters and localization and moved into common filters, particle filters, search, PID control and then finished up the class with a discussion of simultaneous localization and mapping or SLAM. I had had some experience with a search and SLAM specifically in some of my undergrad classes but all of the other topics were brand new to me. Obviously nothing can compare to live lectures in college I feel like that's definitely where I thrive and learn the most but after coming off a full year and a half of Zoom classes from Yale the online platform and lectures and everything really didn't bother me especially since they were very well put together and obviously had a lot of thought going into them compared to some of the you know last minute course videos that I witnessed my senior year. If I had one complaint I would say that the lectures sometimes operated at a much more basic level of understanding when delving into some of these topics compared to the level of understanding that was sometimes required to to attack some of the programming assignments or project. In terms of workload I don't know if I can give you an exact number of hours per week because it was definitely very sporadic. I would say about every other weekend I would sit down for 10 to 12 hours between like Saturday and Sunday and try to knock out like an entire project or at least get myself to a good spot where I felt comfortable with the upcoming deadline. Some weeks were longer some weeks were shorter but it probably averaged out to about six to seven hours of work a week for this one class. Fortunately for me all of the programming assignments and projects were all in Python which is probably the programming language I'm most familiar with so there's not really a lot of friction when it came to me just immediately jumping into a programming assignment and being able to kind of start solving problems. I was actually normally able to get kind of a base naive up and running solution for most of the projects within like two to three hours and the rest of the time was purely debugging and tuning because that's one thing in this class there's a lot of tuning there's a lot of messing with parameters your solution may be correct but you may be sitting at like a 50% and you just kind of have to mess with numbers until you get your grade high enough. With all this talk about programming assignments and projects here's a couple examples of what they actually look like. For our first project we had to use common filters to localize a bunch of meteorites in space and then code the logic for you know a laser beam that would shoot them down before they reached like a certain threshold. In another project we had to implement a full SLAM algorithm an online SLAM algorithm that would you know simultaneously localize and map a forest of trees so that a drone could navigate through the forest and pick up specific packages. Overall the projects were great and I thought the course was great as well. I had a really good time the semester and I don't have a lot of negatives other than the fact that I wish I would have taken a second class so I'm definitely very excited to take two classes next semester. I can make some videos about the classes that I intend on taking next semester as well and kind of recap those whatever you guys are interested in. As a reminder the comment section and specifically my Instagram DMs are always open if you guys have personal questions or just want to come say hi. So give me a follow over there after you subscribe of course. And with that drop a like down below it helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think. I really appreciate you guys so see you next time.