Interested in Second Masters

[ThatBankDude]

What is your budget for those degrees you've listed? Most of them are Analytics, Data Science, is that the field you're looking to go into? I suggest any of the ones available with Coursera or Edx, the ones you have named seem good.  If you're looking for management, the MOOC's from Coursera/Edx are options as well...

I’m fine with spending up around 40k on the degree out of pocket, so long as it means a yearly salary increase that is comparable. I still have 8 months of GI Bill remaining and my job will pay for $6200 per year for tuition. So, all of these should be in the ballpark but some like UT Austin and Georgia Tech I would graduate debt-free but that is only a small consideration.

My goal is to pivot to big name management consulting from Operations Management in a mid-sized market. So, name and brand are very important.

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Hello Navy_Vet!

I graduated from the Duke MSQM program in May 2023, so I could answer any questions that you have about the program.

Great! Thank you. I’m interested in your perceived ROI of the program in the months since graduation. Do you believe that this greatly expanded your network and gave career boosting results? I’m currently a senior ops manager with an MBA from Boise State but I’m interested in moving to the South or Midwest and going from mid/small market to bigger one with a better total comp. 

What would you say the difficulty of the program is compared to your MBA? I don’t have much tech experience or useful knowledge of R or Python.

In terms of network expansion, I absolutely believe it did expand my network. I have connections at Walt Disney, Meta, Fidelity, Google, as well as some top banks. My cohort was very impressive professionally and academically.

I moved out of general operations and into an analyst position and since then, I’ve had several large employers reach out to me trying to recruit me but I enjoy my team and where I am located. In terms of total comp, I went into the program making just under $50K/year and right now, I am making right around $100K/year. 

It is certainly a more difficult program when compared to an MBA. My MBA was a cake walk as it is just general business courses and even the “quant” courses were more analyzing output of data versus cleaning raw data, analyzing, creating visualizations, etc. In the MSQM program you will learn R and Python pretty extensively and learn about NLP, CV, etc.

I tell people who ask me all the time, this is a program that will give you a great foundation to build on but it is not a program to make you a Data Scientist. If you want to be a Data Scientist, I recommend a MS in Statistics, Math, or Computer Science.