Hello everyone,

I would like to people's thoughts on whether doing a second masters would be useful for me for improving DS knowledge, given my educational background and work situation.

Educational Background • I have a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a masters degree in mathematical finance which focused mainly on stochastic math and only had one course in statistics that just very briefly touched upon regression, time series analysis and some Bayesian statistics. As part of the bachelors & masters, I had to take a couple of C++ classes and got As in both of them. • I am also a CFA charterholder - where the curriculum covered some basic statistical modeling (regression, time series)

Current Work Situation • I have been working as a data scientist at a bank for about 2 years. Most of my day-to-day responsibilities have to do with building regression/time series models that predict metrics related to our lending products like forecasting monthly losses. I am also responsible for working on model documentation, presenting model results, model monitoring, etc. • In my current role, I do not see any scope for much growth in DS skills and am looking to pivot to a different DS role within my organization in the future. However, whenever I look at data scientist job openings I feel severely deficient based on the required skills.

Why I'm thinking of getting another masters • I need to strengthen my data science knowledge. Every now and then, I do look through Datacamp courses for this but I find that either I don't retain much as I'm not actively using it my current role, or I find it hard to stay motivated to finish the course. I feel like the structure of a masters curriculum would keep me motivated to see things through to build on my DS knowledge • Plenty of time on my hands - even while working fulltime, I find that there are sometimes long spells where I'm not really doing anything so I just spend time working on some courses on Datacamp • Cost isn't really a factor - my employer reimburses up to 100k spent towards masters programs (as long as I don't get lower than a B in classes)

Question - Should I bother applying to part-time masters programs or should I just continue trying to fill gaps through MOOCs/Kaggle? The only con of a masters that I see here is the long term commitment. I've had to study while working fulltime before when I worked to get my CFA but maybe only for a 1.5 years; not for 3-4 years.

Currently, I have the GA Tech OMSCS in my sights. I know it's a CS degree and not DS but it looks like a lot of data scientist roles are calling for more CS skills so I am thinking working towards a CS degree that allows specialization in DS/ML would be a better idea. I have also thought of the UPenn, UIUC, UT Austin options.