masters in information technology programs are usually about how to make tech work in an organization
at least thats why i enrolled, hedging on a bet that in the AI age, where anyone can now deepen their tech skillset without a formal masters degree, i believe that if you are going to pursue a masters in the AI age, a busines/people-oriented masters or a domain expansive masters (like computational finance or biology) is more relevant
that said, whenever i can, i decided to take on and propose as much technical work as possible for each class, here's some standout coursework for my masters at De La Salle University (DLSU) - Manila:
- Advanced Operating Systems and Networking: developed an Operating System from scratch and presented it (live demo + codebase walkthrough) in class to a group of senior engineers and solution architects. My prof later highlighted it in her recommendation letter when I planned to shift my masters to Georgia Tech's OMSCS, though I eventually decided to defer as I wanted to finish my current masters at DLSU first, here was her rec letter
- Information Systems Architecture: cool groupwork where we were tasked to present a lecture on service-oriented architectures (SOA), then review the microservice software architecture docs of a company's product, specifically Cambridge Core
- Advanced Systems Design: system design with AWS (amazon web services) particularly focused on the design of a search engine deployed to AWS, then for final project, an e-commerce system
- 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, that said there was no implementation/code/demo work as a paper and architecture sufficed to complete the coursework
- Project Management: loads of case studies
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'd surive the review of the class while fulfilling the criteria in your coursework