dspp_grad

What @GradSchoolGrad said is mostly true, most of the impact of this is going to be felt in the long run, but McCourt did send out an email to all students this morning announcing they were *immediately* doubling the availability of scholarships reserved for second year students so they likely will have some extra funds available for incoming students. I think realistically, you might be able to use this to negotiate a few extra grand - for instance, if you had other better funding offers and Georgetown would originally give you 5k more in response, now they might be able to give you an extra 7-8k - but I wouldn't expect anything more than that. In any case, it definitely can't hurt anyone to call and ask!

No problem! I didn't know about the PhD track - in that case, it sounds like Heinz is probably the way to go. You certainly would still be able to land jobs at the DC research organizations coming out of Heinz, you might just have to work a little harder for those positions than if you were coming out of McCourt.

@Kaz_KV Does Heinz list the specific roles at each organization? There are definitely some big-name companies like Facebook and IBM listed but I had the impression the roles at those companies were mostly "Business Analyst" or "Data Analyst" rather than "Data Scientist" (but I definitely could be wrong about that). I would also add that McCourt has a phenomenal track record of placing people into research organizations like Mathematica, Brookings, and Urban Institute; being from McCourt by no means guarantees you a job at these places but does give you a huge leg up and is probably somewhat easier than coming from Heinz. Career-wise I think the most important factor to consider is simply whether you want to work in D.C. afterward. If you know you want to be in D.C., you should probably choose McCourt; if you want to keep your options more geographically open, you should probably choose Heinz. Being able to take PhD courses at Heinz is definitely a point in CMU's favor but, to the best of my knowledge, Public Policy PhD programs definitely aren't expecting you to have already taken PhD courses when you apply.

Thanks, I appreciate it! FWIW, I agree with your general assessments about Dr. Bailey versus the career services office.

@Kaz_KV It's definitely hard to extrapolate from one year of DSPP data, but keep in mind that the first cohort only had about 20 students so the difference between 75% and 85% is literally two students. In my current DSPP graduating cohort about half of students already have jobs lined up, from what I know, and most of the rest are at least in the interview process with several organizations. I have no doubt that in a non-pandemic year, that 75% would probably be at least 90%.

Hi @Kaz_KV, I was in a similar situation, deciding between MSPPM-DA and MSDSPP, and ultimately decided to go with McCourt (will be graduating in May). You're absolutely right that there is a big difference between Heinz's focus on data analytics and McCourt's focus on data science, and I got a pretty strong impression that the DSPP program was much more technically rigorous than the MSPPM-DA. (Revealingly, when I attended the admitted students day for Chicago's MSCAPP the guy who ran that program said he held the DSPP program in much higher regard than the MSPPM-DA.) The DSPP curriculum is more of a data science master's with a few policy classes thrown in, while the MSPPM-DA seemed to have a much higher ratio of management-type classes to technical classes. Like the above poster said, if you want to be a Data Scientist in the private sector you should just do a master's in data science. But if you want to be a Data Scientist in the public or non-profit sectors McCourt will much better position you for that than Heinz, in my opinion. (And a few people from the DSPP program actually have gotten Data Scientist roles in the private sector, but I don't know if that's also true of Heinz.) There are pros and cons to both schools, obviously, but I wouldn't put too much weight on one pretty prolific poster's opinions in making a decision.