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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog
 | Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff. |
 | Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography. |
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Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs. |
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Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music. |
 | Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies. |
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Time Poor
It's nearly the end of the semester! Just three more weeks! In three weeks, I'll be 1/6th done with my masters programs here at Carnegie Mellon (time flies when you're having fun).
The hardest thing about being a part time student is balance. There are prior commitments to family, friends, work, school, and not to mention your personal life. Just juggling a few of them during busy times turns out to be quite a balancing act (minus broken dishes, add in broken feelings). To put this in perspective, 20 hours of part time school is 4 hour extra sleep a night -- quite a bit if you asked me. Most of the students I've talked to spend around that many hours working on school materials (not counting commute time). In effect, attending a part time masters program will teach you some very good time management skills.
Personally, I think it takes a huge amount of dedication. In this Fall and Winter season, the days are shorter and the amount of nice sunny days in which one possibly can enjoy are quite rare. There were some extremely nice weekend days where the sun was perfect, the air was crisp, the birds were in the air -- and we scheduled a group meeting to complete school work for the entire day. The "nice day" experience would be inside my car rather than outside biking or hiking. I think it's those moments which how big of an endeavor pursuing a masters degree really sinks in.
Thankfully, CMU and the students understand that family is more important than school. So even though I've been attending school part time, I haven't missed any important family or important friend events. This is the final stretch for this semester and then we'll have our month long break!
posted by Anthony Tang @ 3:51 PM
