MSCAPP - A Review One Year Later

I spent my summer relaxing and looking back at the year gone by. I hadn’t realized but the past academic year was probably the most I had worked over any other period in my life. The program had tested my patience, intellect and discipline. There was a lot I had learnt and a lot more I needed to do over the second year to make the most of MSCAPP. In a previous post, I detailed out what my thought process was on choosing to pursue MSCAPP. It was a post I had originally written before I started the program. A year later with half the program completed, I hope to present an updated picture.

CAPP Community

Prof. Anne, one of the founders of the program and the current Faculty co-Director, has painstakingly nurtured a great community spirit at CAPP. There is a sense of shared identity visible among all the students and reinforced by the frequent events – talks and lunches – that are held exclusively for the CAPP cohort. The Program Director Katie and assistant Program Director Alyssa have been amazing at keeping this sense of camaraderie going. Together, they handle all the managerial and advisory needs of the program. Despite my own reserved nature, I too do feel some shared sense of identity and community and I applaud all those who are part of the administration of the program for this.

CAPP Slack

Evidence for the above point is the CAPP Slack channel which has over time grown to be a very active space for alum, current students and staff to engage across different themes. It is the primary mode of job and internship search for most CAPP students. It is also used by many alumnus who you can reach out to for advice and support. I have myself used Slack heavily to select my courses – based on historical advice and private chats amongst students. The advice shared by alum helped me design my course path for the program based on my career interests.

CS Core Classes

With one egregious exception, I have enjoyed all my CS classes and learnt immensely from them. Intermediate Python Programming was an excellent course to refresh my Python. Linear Algebra with Prof. Amitabh was excellent. Prof. Amitabh is a talented and empathetic Professor with a great sense of humour. Databases with Prof. Elmore was another great course. Databases is a fascinating topic and I really enjoyed the assignments and final project. The one major disappointment amongst the CS core classes was the Machine Learning CAPP course in the Spring which I believed was a total waste of my time. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve borrowed what amounts to a large fortune in India to attend this program, I could have forgiven a couple of sub-standard courses. However, as I see my student loans ballooning and the spectre of a global recession on the horizon, I can’t help but feel aggrieved over being mandated to take courses which are irrelevant to my personal goals and/or abysmally taught and structured.

Harris Core Classes

As I’d mentioned in the previous post, the lack of electives in MSCAPP was a major annoyance. I particularly want to single out the Stats sequence at Harris and my personal dismay (the majority don’t share my anger) at being forced into these courses. I found the sequence poorly designed with limited theoretical grounding. I skipped most of the lectures by the end. I greatly regret not trying to take the sequence at the Statistics department instead. Another grouse, though unfair to blame Harris or anyone else really, is the theoretical nature of the policy classes. A lot of policy classes and discussions in the classrooms can be exasperating due to their idealism, the at times un-grounded views presented and the never-ending cyclic philosophical debates that are the essence of such classes. As a student of Engineering, starved of such intellectual stimulation, I do find philosophy exhilarating. However, paying thousands of dollars for such courses does make me feel uneasy. In contrast to the Stats sequence, the classes with Prof. Durlauf and Prof Burlig were especially enlightening. Prof. Durlauf is a renowned economist and an excellent lecturer and I could listen to him go on about inter-generational mobility or assortative matching for hours on end. Prof. Burlig’s Program Evaluation class was a superb overview of different research and evaluation designs which solidified the concepts covered in the Stats sequence.

Despite my limited efforts, late start as well as the global pandemic, I did not find the internship search to be very stressful. I was more confident in my programming and statistics knowledge at the end of the first year and this directly helped me in my search. I believe an interdisciplinary program like CAPP was very helpful in signalling the technical skills you bring to the table especially in the policy space. For better or for worse, it stands out among other more traditional programs. I started my internship search earnestly in March and it was complete with my acceptance of an offer by the end of April. While I did receive a couple of internship offers, I do not think the Career Development Office (CDO) at Harris was instrumental in this regard. I do understand the frequently held grouse that the CDO is unable to meet the demands of its international student body. It does seem like it is tailored heavily towards domestic students with limited years of work experience. However, I do shoulder a large chunk of the blame for not making the most of their resources. One important point to be noted is I received a scholarship to pursue my summer position without which it would have been unpaid and thereby impossible to pursue. For that, I’m eternally grateful to Harris.

Alternate to Core

One alternative to having 11 core courses (out of 18) is to have students choose different tracks. For example, instead of an MSCAPP student being forced to take courses in Economics, Statistics, Politics, Programming and Machine Learning, they could have a choice to take 3 or 4 different tracks. Someone like me could have skipped Machine Learning or Politics instead taking more classes in Statistics/Econometrics or Programming. This way even if the core tracks add up to 11 or more courses at the very least they are tracks you voluntarily signed into. This is akin to the specializations in the UChicago CS department or the certificates at Harris, both of which are now difficult to obtain due to the lack of electives.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, the first year of MSCAPP for me has been academically and socially very fulfilling. The sense of community fostered by the CAPP team has helped me not lose sight among the thousand odd students at Harris. Having found a good summer internship was also crucial in colouring my entire experience positive. While the excessive number of mandatory core classes did bother me, I made my peace with it and am trying to focus on the electives that I am really passionate about. The second year brings its own set of challenges. I hope at the end of it my opinion on the program remains as positive as it is now.