HELP! I'm in OMSCS and I Need to GET OUT! (Tales from the Trenches: How to Survive—and Maybe Just Thrive—in OMSCS)

Abstract

For regular humans, an MSc from Georgia Tech would already be turning Hard Mode up to 11. But let’s be honest: none of you reading this are regular humans. As if your lives aren’t stimulating enough already, you opted to level up your MSc and bought the Online Expansion. After enabling grown-up features like Life, Family, and Work, suddenly things shifted from OMSCS to OMG. Life doesn’t pause when OMSCS starts! Whether it’s a global pandemic, raising a family, traveling internationally, being alone in a distant time zone, regular power outages, hungry sharks eating undersea internet cables, grappling with political uprisings, putting up with American pronunciation of Ubuntu, or learning to accept segfaults, Life never pauses. By now most of y’all are tasting God Mode all the way to 11—and yet, somehow, you’ll get through everything and GET OUT, having learned a little more about Computer Science, and a LOT more about Life! This presentation aims to bring a little bit of perspective to the OMSCS experience and just maybe a bit more hope to overcoming the challenges. I'll share my lessons learned and a recipe for survival in OMSCS despite how much Life tried to make me fail. Along the way, I may have faced hundreds of hours of power cuts, millions of bytes of lost internet data, thousands of rampaging citizens, months of lockdown, and an abundance of exam venues all over the world, but I still don't have a single regret!

Bio

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Bryan Johnston is a Senior HPC Technologist at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, South Africa. He leads the HPC Ecosystems Project, responsible for repurposing decommissioned tier-1 HPC systems for resource-constrained environments, leading cyberinfrastructure workforce development in the region, and fostering a scientific computing community spanning five continents. Despite graduating a while back, he just won’t seem to let go—he traveled to Atlanta in 2024 just to hang with OMSCS staff.