Do MOOCs (online courses) help in MS applications?

MOOCs for Applications

Many students wonder if doing online courses (MOOCs) will help in their MS or college applications.

What are MOOCs

MOOCs are (Massive Open Online Courses) targeting open access for student participation via Internet. In a world where everything is just one click away, why should education be left behind? Why do we need to be in a physical classroom for gathering knowledge? This is why MIT and Harvard created edX in 2012 that hosts online university level courses. Soon, sites like Coursera, Udemy, Udacity and Khan Academy started offering a large variety of courses for academic, professional and interest based learning. 

Most of the engineering colleges in developing countries are struggling to find qualified faculty. While the courses are being taught for the sake of it, students are passing not by proving their knowledge but by last minute rote learning, copying assignments and solving previous year question papers. They say a true engineer never studies until the last two days before the exam!

But this jugaad engineering falls flat at the first contact with professional world. After all, you need to know and do things when you show up at work. Similarly, when a student applies to universities abroad, they expect you to be not only conversant in the basic subjects but also exhibit mastery over some of them. And getting into these top notch universities is not about cracking an entrance exam, but impressing with your overall profile – projects, grades, experience, scores etc. Poor Indian student realizes that his jugaad is not going to work here.

How to use MOOCs to enhance your applications

You can improve skills that are helpful in your college or graduate program by taking MOOCs. That is one way to improve your candidature for BS or MS in USA.

  • MOOCs can compensate for your low grades in a similar class you took in college. Or, they can fill in for lack of a formal education in the area you are applying to. For example, if you are expressing an interest in Computer Security and your college did not offer enough relevant electives, you can take such courses on a MOOC.
  • Developing good projects in these courses can be a great way to show you are a pro-active learner. These projects can go into your resume and add more talking points in your next interview. Few skills that can be advantageous during your hunt for on-campus jobs and assistantships are web development, perl scripting, excel modeling etc.

Case Studies of applicants using MOOCs to their advantage

Yasho Vardhan, an MIS applicant was feeling that his average GPA was putting him at a disadvantage in his applications. To further enhance his profile, he decided to take Introduction to ‘Python for Data Science’ on edX and ‘R Programming’ on Coursera. Since he was interested in Analytics which is growing more popular and competitive, he felt that he needed something more than his academics and work experience to differentiate himself. Further, such courses were highly recommended by his seniors at University of Maryland, the place where he headed to. 

For more info, read: What MOOCs are popular among MS applicants?

Where to find good MOOCs?

Here are top sites to access high quality free courses that you can look at:

While MOOCs are good for skill development, having a MOOC certificate alone may not help that much. There’s always a trust problem – who knows if you only took the MOOC certification exam or your friend? Therefore, let not the certificate be your primary motivation, try to genuinely learn something and reflect that in your story.

Why do applicants prefer Fall semester over Spring?

ms in usa - fall vs spring

If you did not receive your dream admit in Fall or if you had missed your Fall deadlines, you are probably considering a critical question that many applicants are confused about – Fall vs Spring?

Although it remains inconclusive whether starting your graduate school in Spring adversely affects your admission chances, there are few things you should know about applying for Spring semester:

School shortlisting in Fall vs Spring

Primarily, not all schools have a Spring intake and hence, your choices of programs that you can apply to are fewer than what you have in Fall. Moreover, some schools have Spring applications only to fill out their left over seats from Fall admissions and admit students on a rolling basis. Some of the schools that have a Spring intake are:

  • Cornell
  • UIUC
  • Purdue
  • CMU
  • University of Wisconsin Madison
  • USC
  • NYU
  • Syracuse

Getting a summer Internship Fall vs Spring

You can get a CPT only after 9 months of your arrival into USA. For this reason, Spring students cannot get a CPT to intern off-campus during their first summer. However, they can still do a full-time summer internship their second summer but they need to attend one more semester at their school after finishing the internship. This means that they cannot do a summer internship in the second year if they are planning to graduate in 3 semesters only. If a summer internship is critical for you, then consider applying for a course beginning in Fall so that you do not face such restrictions.

Do enquire with your department if summer internship is possible after going in Spring. Our student Praneeth confirms that SUNY Stonybrook does NOT allow it.

Getting Financial Aid

While some people argue that chances of scholarships are low in Spring than Fall, there is no evidence to support this. It all depends on the availability of funding with the university and the Professors.

Availability of Courses in Fall vs Spring

There is another notion that not all the mainstream courses are offered in Spring. Again, I have seen this both ways i.e. some courses are offered in Fall typically and some in Spring, so there is no general rule across all the schools. More popular courses might be offered preferably in Fall since that is the most common intake period and number of students enrolling for the courses are higher in Fall. However, it is better to take a look at the curriculum before assuming that you will not find enough good courses in Spring. You might be interested in some courses which are offered in Fall only but the chances are that you can take it in your second semester anyway. Many courses are designed such that you can take first part in fall second part in spring, you wouldn’t be able to take these courses in spring.

Accommodation, Weather and Networking

It might also be very difficult to get accommodation when you join during spring as most leases start fall and end in summer. You also miss the big university wide orientations that happen during fall. January weather in east coast is pretty bad too.

This is part of the MS Book. To get more such relevant information, please check out MS Book: Smart Engineer’s Complete Guide to MS in USA.