Northeastern Align Program
Does anyone have experience with the Align program at Northeastern? For those who don’t know, it’s a CS Masters for non-CS undergrads, 1 year bridge courses+2 years of masters classes. I’ve been at State Street in investment management for 3 years after graduating with a finance degree (CS minor), and have been regretting not exploring a CS career. This might be a great way to launch a career change, curious to see what others think. (If it matters, it won’t be a problem financially, and I would be able to keep my job at State Street while enrolled)
I go to Northeastern undergrad and I'd say that the grad program has a bit of a reputation for having a lot of really bad international students who just need a US degree. It's easy to ride the curve and get an A if coding clicks with you and you study. Also coop rocks and helps you get work experience. However in your situation I'd look into the Georgia Tech Online Masters in CS. It's a normal cs masters that can be done part time and online for only about 8k all in. Your degree is exactly the same as if you attended GT in person. This will let you learn the fundamentals you're missing with your minor while still letting you work full time. I think once you take a good algorithms and data structures course anywhere you're ready to grind leetcode because you'll have a better understanding of what makes the good solutions good.
Hey this is actually pretty good I’m looking into it. However I have zero cs experience however I got masters and undergrad in finance
Hey check out this Bootcamp thing provided by Worcester state university. It’s called web developer course only 16 weeks. That would help. I can’t take it this year cus I have 0 dev experience.
Are you able to handle leetcode questions?
I can handle most easy ones, starts to get a bit iffy after that. I definitely am a bit out of practice at the moment, my position requires 0 coding, and haven’t kept up outside of work
Spending money on a master degree just to get into tech feels overkill. Keep practicing leetcode to upgrade your Kungfu. And learn system design. If you want to switch to SWE, you probably need to start at the bottom, which is at the grad level. Once you have a few years experience, you should have no problem jumping tech companies.