First of all, congrats. That sounds like an amazing opportunity and I am legitimately jealous.

I imagine the competitiveness is quite different between an online program from Georgia Tech for ~4,500 students[0] and an onsite program at Princeton for a few dozen. :)

[0] https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/prospective-students/numbers

The funding implies a requirement that you will work on research, which for most people would preclude working a full-time software engineering job. Assuming a full-time job would bring in more income than the tuition plus stipend, when we take opportunity cost into account, pursuing the OMSCS while working full time still is financially less expensive.

I don't know why one would even consider a non-funded research based graduate program. Even with my tuition waived and stipend I still almost feel ripped off despite being at a good school (UIUC MS).

Can you expand on this? Is it because of the opportunity cost of working during that time, or because you have to work so hard that the small positive amount of money you come away with is not worth your labor?

For context, I'm pretty sure all of Princeton's grad students are funded (including masters of public administration).

Still cool, just wanted to put it out there in case anyone was wondering what their CS dept is up to.

That's very cool if true. Usually it's very difficult to get funding as a Master's student because prof's want the full PhD commitment.

I did reasearch during my MS as well. Tuition + Healthcare + Stipend. Still lost out on 1.5 years of $100k+ a year to slowly lose money (whatever the stipend didn't cover in my living expenses) and get a MS, but I'm happy in the end.

I haven't looked into the details for a very long time. But whether there's research/thesis at least used to be a big variant among MS/ME programs and there wasn't an obvious pattern based on the "prestige" of the school. One will be one year of mostly classroom learning. Another will be a couple years about half of which is primarily focused on research and writing a thesis.

I only see references to the Princeton program being self-funded. Do you have any details?

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