> I wish my school offered something even half good as this.
Me too. In my school, we had great introduction/mid-level classes but at the graduate level, I found our classes underwhelming. Mostly Prof/Researchers teaching their narrow specialties and trying to recruit PhD students, but without putting much time in their lectures as they didn't care about teaching. Bunch of slides, research papers to read. They wouldn't bother making a heavy programming project, which was left to their colleagues doing less research.
I'm in a Master's (and possibly jumping to PhD) program at a Big Tech School that you've probably heard of -- and that's my feeling as well.
Fairly underwhelming. Lots of online resources to chase after to catch up to the state of the art, but a lot of the courses are things like the history of, and developments of, the technology. Worth knowing, but I don't need multiple, year-long adventures in this stuff -- get me to modern, and then let's solve some actual problems!
I used to think like this until I actually spent some time with the modern things after learning a lot of the historical development paths. A lot of research is stitching together disparate ideas that have developed in their own little community silos. The best skills you can learn as a researcher are to appreciate, recognize (non-surface level) similarities between, and how to synthesize existing research.
There's an awful lot of cult of the new that goes on in modern research.
> modern things after learning a lot of the historical development paths
While not research, it is nontheless interesting to watch every generation of programmers (including mine) re-discover RDBMS after tripping over all the pitfalls with the hot new stuff.
Me too. In my school, we had great introduction/mid-level classes but at the graduate level, I found our classes underwhelming. Mostly Prof/Researchers teaching their narrow specialties and trying to recruit PhD students, but without putting much time in their lectures as they didn't care about teaching. Bunch of slides, research papers to read. They wouldn't bother making a heavy programming project, which was left to their colleagues doing less research.