Doing my master’s at De La Salle University (DLSU)
The beauty of grad school is your coursework is based on your taste, you can decide to work on hard complex topics for fun as long as it fulfills the criteria in your coursework.
The journey so far:
- IT Service Management: class covers the concepts found in ITIL v4
- Deep Learning: covers modern AI/Artificial Intelligence from its core foundations of MLPs/multilayer perceptrons, Convolutional Neural Networks, Comptuer Vision, Recurrent Neural Networks, Natural Langauge Processing, optimization algorithms, then towards Transformers and Large Language Models, basically it covers this book
- Enterprise Architectures: ---
- Advanced Operating Systems and Networking: my project was developing an Operating System from scratch in C and Assembly programming language and then presenting it live in class to a group of senior engineers and solution architects. My professor later highlighted it in her recommendation letter for a graduate study, tho in the end I decided to defer that application to finish my current studies at DLSU. For the rest of the coursework we had fun tasks like designing an AI infrastructure for a business. There were also other notable exercises like Docker containerization exercises and analyzing network packets.
- Information Systems Architecture: for final project, we analyze the system design of a real system and its design docs, specifically Cambridge Core’s microservice architecture, proposing improvements. We also had cool groupworks such as one where we were tasked to present a lecture on service-oriented architectures.
- Advanced Systems Design: for the final project, I designed a B2B e-commerce like web application. The class was basically about exploring the different stages of the design process in software engineering. For my coursework I studied and presented system design with AWS (Amazon Web Services), focusing on the design of a search engine deployed in AWS.
- Shared & Collaborative Systems: my project was extending LLM-based misinformation simulations into a governance digital twin for shared collaborative systems, basically designing an AI agent governance platform. THis was a research-oriented class, mostly exploring the design of various tech products from a human-computer interaction (HCI) and business perspective
- Project Management: loads of case studies. I didnt get much out of it because the class time coincided with my work hours. A massive shame as the course offered PMBOK certifications.
my goofy ID
Soon…
The next step after my education at DLSU is to take, a 2nd or more masters part-time while working a full time job. Or perhaps even full-time at a different country. My father managed to finish 2 master degrees while working a demanding job in senior leadership in his 30s and later abroad in his 40s