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My time at San Jose State was filled with lots of organization mismanagement and tedious issues like lack of available classes that detracted from the school experience. SJSU is also a commuter dominant college, so myself living on campus joined the greek life to be more involved in the smaller social scene of the area. While I was going there, the campus was heavily under construction so I believe newer students will reap the benefits of new facilities that I was unable too. SJSU's drop out rates,... Read More under funded departments and lack of care/interest from my peers overall left a negative experience for me.

Strictly from an academics point of view, the school curriculum is very behind the times. Of course when I went there it was many years ago so this info could be outdated now. The CS program back then had many classes that were very much not relevant today. They did not even go over common things like GIT/Github. Most of the classes were basic or theory related, and don't really help with real world environments. I imagine now its probably a lot worse with AI. You probably will be far behind peers... Read More of other better schools.

I attended San Jose State University from Fall 2022 up until May 2025. I was in the online Information Science & Data Analytics undergraduate program. I would say overall the program has been nothing but great for me. The different types of classes are from cyber security, data science, information security, etc. They all taught very well, and I got out numerous skills and knowledge from each of them. The professors for my school were excellent as well. Even though it was an online program, the connection... Read More I felt was as close to in-person as possible. If I needed help with an assignment or needed a clarification. The professors always got back to me and went above and beyond explaining the modules or projects for me. I would highly recommend any upcoming university student like me to consider San Jose State University.

Although I would not immediately recommend this program to just anybody that is interested, it MIGHT be an ideal program in a particular situation depending on the student's career path and what they want and expect from this degree. However, my impression of the curriculum in this online graduate degree program is that it is more of an OVERVIEW or SURVEY of informatics in general. Each semester is divided in half with courses being 9 weeks in length. This time frame worked out fine for some courses,... Read More but other courses, the more technical ones requiring the downloading, understanding and use of software, should have been full length semester courses. Case in point: the course Big Data Analytics, a fantastic subject with a fantastic instructor, but we students were simply overwhelmed with information and the course felt very rushed. Again, the course was more of a SURVEY of Big Data, without going too far into any one subject for very long, simply because there was not enough time to do so. We had to move along. The same can be said for the course Human Centered Design, which was an overview of designing and developing user-centered knowledge structures for the Web environment. Although this was a two-unit course, it was one of the most difficult courses in the program because it involved learning a number of software tools, forming groups to work with, and developing a group presentation, all online, and all in the span of half a semester. Again, it should have been a full semester course. The career pathway (specialization) courses were overall very good, particularly the health informatics courses. The cybersecurity courses were good, but we spent far too much time using the same software program doing repetitive tasks as instructed by the software, and it just went for far too long in this manner. The lectures were excellent, however. The saving grace of this program for me was that it was still relatively inexpensive for a 30-unit graduate program when I signed up and started in January 2020 through my graduation in 2022. However, I understand that the tuition at SJSU has gone up in 2023. So, I feel that this program is great for someone already working in health informatics or cybersecurity and who wants to reinforce the knowledge that they already have in order to advance their career. For someone with no experience who wants to get that knowledge from a graduate degree program, this program will help, but falls short in certain areas. Ultimately, I can recommend the program to some, but not to all.

Avoid the UW Data Science master's programs at all costs! The professors didn't really teach anything at all. Normally i would be fine with this, if they would just give us books to read or other sources to study from. But the material they provided did not actually cover what we were expected to learn. They prided themselves on their website & chatsite to give information, but they still didn't use it to teach anything, and the sites were not as impressive as other free options elsewhere. All they... Read More did on the sites was answer ad hoc questions irrelevant to the material that we were supposed to be learning. The sole exception to all of the above was the one marketing class they require you to take, which was decent. All of the other courses were bogus. The professors didn't really know what they were doing. You could tell the university was just trying to jump on the bandwagon of providing data science degrees without actually thinking through what would be necessary to teach within such a degree.

This university makes me feel that the US is now a 3rd world country! Make no mistake and avoid this place! Why aren't news casters reporting and investigating on the poor education system that is on the side of criminals rather than students and its own people? Someone needs to report these to the general public and protect their own people! This university gives people a hard time, not in a challenging way. I feel that I barely escaped by leaving the area as its been drastically hit by crime and... Read More poor government system. The system is NOT on the students side and is criminalized. There were people who were trying to fail students and their own people literally. Due to poor government structure the education system doesn't back up the students when instructors or staff are corrupt / take their anger out on students either. I feel sorry for anyone who has to go here as they often threaten students. Despite efforts to minimize crime in the US, it is just increasing because of the terrible government. Night hours are way unsafe! Couldn't go to class without having fear. I wish I didn't go to this school because of the criminalized systems of the US. Attend a different school if you can, this place is unsafe and harmful to students.

San Jose State University is a great college to attend to further your education. Since I have graduated there have been many changes around the campus that really feels like a top of the line school. A new recreation center, a new pool, new dorm rooms built for students. However, just like any college there are pros and cons. One con to consider is the area. With being located in the middle of downtown there are some dangers that can arise when there due to the homeless population. Another to consider... Read More is the cost of living, being that it is located in a city the cost of living can be very expensive. Potentially even leaving some students unable to afford their month to month expenses. However, aside from the cons San Jose State has a good range of majors and is located in tech savvy area with many opportunities to connect with the surrounding companies.

SJSU is a great college for those looking to major in engineering or business. Sitting in the heart of the Bay Areas texhnindustry, most other schools on campus fell by the wayside and went unnoticed, the Arts especially. The Art building is one of the oldest on campus and still has yet to be renovated. It sits there as sad proof that the university does not care about the humanities. Arts lacked funding to even keep certain required classes available every semester, making classes impacted and causing... Read More many to wait even longer to try and graduate.