Good luck, I hope it works out for you - Let us know your topic -)
Another UCF student here in the Masters program for digital forensics. Career wise a master's degree will never hurt you. I am mostly in it because we didn't have an undergrad program for it but did have a few elective classes for CF. One thing you can expect with a master's program is very focused curriculum and classes. I don't know much about the job market in the UK though.
Do you guys have any opinions on online master's degrees? They are great for the convenience of being able to attend from anywhere, but I find that some people believe they are diploma mills.
Here are a few things to look at for online programs
1. are the associated with or part of a traditional college? If they are, great. If they are a pure online college, be careful. Some of the pure online colleges work out of storefronts.
2. do they offer credits for "life experience"? Be very careful
3. do they have (in the US), regional Accreditation? Diploma mill school will often create their own accreditation bodies, but if it is not regional accreditated, the credits and degree won't be worth much. See http//
4. are the courses the same - or are the online course different? I know that at one college, the network security face-2-face class set up isolated LANs, infected them with viruses, and then cleaned them - the online class wrote a paper about how they would clean an infected network - big difference, as the f2f class got actual hands-on experience. I know one guy who got an online masters in computer security and only ever wrote papers, so he took my undergrad security class because we did hands-on (setting up routers, firewalls, etc) to gain the experience.
5. What year was the college established? Older is better.
6. Are the syallbi, book lists, instructor names available online for you to look at before you enroll? If not, will they send them to you? (Many schools are now putting their entire courses, including videos online for free). The judgement here is the degree of openess.
7. Do they publish the students master's thesis? This will give you an idea on the level of work they are performing.
Too often I have seen online classes just be writing courses, with no real hands-on work. For forensics and computer security work, hands-on is critical.
Hoped this helped,
bj
Hi,
Have you looked into funding options or what type of help is available? The MSc I undertook (Security & Forensic Computing @ Dublin City University, Ireland) was funded by the EU, and it significantly reduced my fees … The table of fees is
Ofcourse moving to Ireland for 1 year might not be possible, but they have just released a Part Time course.
Ronan
OK, I'm kinda leaning towards doing a research based MSc. I need to give it some thought and see what things interest me. I've seen previous posts on here giving good ideas, just wondering if anyone has any fresh comments about research topics.
Depends on your interests and abilities DFICSI. As I'm sure you can appreciate, one size doesn't fit all. If you were a programming wizard, U3 and all it offers, including a forensically sound image of a password protected device would be good. Or just a well researched "everything the examiner wanted to know" would be helpful.
Lots of opportunity for advanced research for quick look activity / edd. Such things a word pattern analysis or phrase pattern analysis. Just depends on what is of interest to you.
Hi,
You could look into doing an MSc at Dublin City University (renowned for it's IT courses). They have an excellent MSc in Computer Security & Forensics
Do you guys have any opinions on online master's degrees? They are great for the convenience of being able to attend from anywhere, but I find that some people believe they are diploma mills.
Yeah I think some can be a bit shady - just make sure you do a program that's with an accredited university and then you won't have any troubles. I'd suggest checking out http//