Ask HN: Career and Academic advice

Dear HN,

I’m a long time lurker and really quite enjoy the helpful community here. I was hoping that I’d be able to get some feedback on my current career/educational experience and if my future plans would be realistic to landing a development position.

My academic background is in International Relations for undergrad and I’ve about 6 years of IT experience ranging from Help Desk to Sys Admin type positions. Currently I find myself as a tester for a system like SAP. I’ve gone ahead and began doing some Java programming classes through a local online university and plan to take the second level next semester, which is equivalent to Oracle’s Java Junior Associate certification (based on the curriculum from this community college). The reason for taking these two classes is that it’d be enough for the pre-requisites for a Master of Science in Information Technology [1]. I feel at this point in time (late 20’s) that it’d be wise to move forward with a Masters instead of attempting a second Bachelor in computer science. I’ve also explored attempting to do substantially more pre-requisite classes for a Master in Computer Science at the same university, but the math looks to be quite a challenge (CALC 1/2 + Discrete Math). My rationale for going back to school is that many dev positions require a STEM type degree to even be considered.

Financially I have no debts, 60k in savings and in state tuition would be very low at 7k a year. I’ve been familiarizing myself with SQL, Java, Powershell to the point of being able to complete assigned low complexity tasks and delivering them quickly with good feedback. This current job just doesn’t have any dev positions I could expect to move into unfortunately. Any advice or clarification needed on my part would be very helpful.

Thanks HN!

[1] http://catalog.utsa.edu/graduate/business/informationsystemscybersecurity/#msit [2] http://www.cs.utsa.edu/graduate/ms#admission