Resources for New Students at GaTech OMSA

Recently I finish the Online Master of Science (OMSA) in Analytics at Georgia Tech. I dive into this program without much knowledge or what to expect. To help others that might be in my situation, I wanted to create this post.

What is the program?

First of all, we need to know what are we getting into.

The OMSA is a fully online program hosted by Georgia Tech. It is a multidisciplinary program in which I have learned about modeling, optimization, business, finance, trading, and big data, among multiple things. This approach was very interesting to me. I have a background in Software Engineering, so some of these topics were very familiar, but others were totally new.

Although is a fully online program, it mimics the in-person offering. This means that you will have access to the same course materials and staff that the in-person students will have. Not all courses are offered in the online variant, but it shouldn't be much of a problem.

The classes are similar to a MOOC. The greatest strength is the online forums, professors, and TA (Teaching Assistants). This gives the program so much depth and you will never feel alone in your journey. However, the homework assignments and exams are challenging. This program is definitely something to consider in terms of dedication. For two years I have been working full time and studying two courses each semester and this is something I don't recommend. If you can, halt your full-time job or do only one course for each term. I can't stress this enough, don't underestimate the dedication to this program.

Talking about semesters, this program has 3 terms each year: Fall, Spring, and Summer. This is something that caught me by surprise when I was admitted. The Summer semester is significantly shorter than the other two, so the offering of courses is limited to the ones that can be adapted to fit in this reduced timeframe. It is also very common to leave the Summer semester blank to take some rest. In my opinion, it is the best semester because of its duration and it was the one I enjoyed the most. I will recommend taking two courses in the Summer.

To complete the program you will need to finish 10 courses and a Final Practicum course. By default, you can do a maximum of 2 courses each semester

Admission Process for an International Student

The first requirement is a university degree. You will also need your academic transcripts. As an international student, you must have those translated to English by a certified authority (a translation service in my country was good enough) if your university can't provide English documents. This will include sending the documents in certified mail to Georgia Tech.

If you are from a non-English country, you will also need the TOEFL score. You will need to score above 95 to be considered valid. My experience with this test is that is fairly easy to get a good enough score if you already use English in your professional life, or you consume a lot of English content. Just make sure to prepare the most obvious things like spelling, vocabulary, a few grammar tricks, etc... Also, you must know what to expect from the test, so study very well each of the parts and how they will play out. This will give you the confidence to get it done.

Another part of the process is to get 3 recommendation letters. This is self-explanatory. For my recommendation letters, I asked a maths professor of mine during my Software Engineer degree, an old boss, and my current boss at that time.

The admission process is quite long. So make sure you started it with time, between six months and a year of your application semester. This will give you the time to complete all the bureaucracy needed without stressing out too much. With good recommendation letters and an acceptable academic record, I believe is not much of a problem to get in.

A Few Words about the Price

One big consideration of this program is the price. It positions itself in a very competitive credit hour pricing in the standards of American education. The total costs for me were about $11K approximately. For comparison, the in-person program is 4 times higher, at approximately $44k.

For each term, the costs are:

$275 by credit hour. All the courses are 3 credit hours so that will be $825 for each course. The Final Practicum is the only exception with 6 credit hours.

$301 as a mandatory student fee.

This means that the faster you complete the program, the more money you can save as the mandatory student fee each term.

Keep in mind that this doesn't count the costs associated with the bureaucracy I mentioned before, like translating documents or registering for the TOEFL. Don't forget this when doing your numbers.

Alternatives

There are multiple other online masters that you might want to check out. Coursera has a bunch of them in collaboration with different American universities. However, for me the obvious ones are the rest of the offerings at GaTech: