On being accepted into a Computer Science Masters Programme

Cue nervous laughter, anxiety and an unhealthy dose of imposter syndrome.

I applied to the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT) online programme earlier in May and I must say that the past 1.5 months was when I experienced the full effects of Einstein’s relativistic time dilation theory.

Everything’s coming up Einstein!

The 45 days felt like 90, and time slowed a little more every time I counted down the number of days to the decision date. Of course like any functioning human being, during this period of time, you’d try to do more research on the programme and the people in it.

Needless to say, it felt like there was a black hole that constantly trying to tug at your confidence and self-worth after realising that it is an Ivy League university after all and much of the students there are borderline, if not full-blown overachievers.

Here is a sneak-peek of some of the questions that I was wrestling with after reading r/onlineMCIT on Reddit and watching some YouTube videos:

1. People with GPAs of 3.9 are being rejected, what makes you think you’ll be accepted?
2. Damn, these UPenn students have got to be one of the most motivated students in the nation whilst here I am giggling at cat gifs and memes.
3. Wow, these guys commenting on these threads are consuming MOOCs like it’s a buffet and here I am struggling with basic Java programming.

So, yes — it was not an easy wait. I was almost expecting to be rejected.

The night before decisions day I had a sleepless night and when I finally did sleep I was dreaming about how I probably should have added some other stuff in my application to bolster my chances.

I woke up feeling rekted, but I still had another 12 hours to go before knowing what the decision is. Eventually, I saw an email notification from UPenn whilst I was playing a game of League of Legends in the evening. It was at that moment I pushed (typed in caps) my teammates that we had to finish up the game because I had some serious business to attend to.

Said serious business is as depicted by the picture below:

Oh shit, it’s happening.

I spent the next hour being in a daze without fully comprehending what actually happened. I was ecstatic, excited, but also unsure and being slightly worried about how I would fare being with all these smart people.

But there’s no time to lose! I’ve since accepted the offer from UPenn and I would be starting the programme on 30 Aug 2021.

I haven’t been thinking much about how I am going to get prepared but I will definitely use this space to document my journey. So you’d expect more articles from me in the near time.