i finished my masters, but one problem is that is over half the courses in a 10 course masters program, which generally only allows for 4 total electives. As a CS grad, I felt handcuffed by required core courses and other 'select 2/4 of these, which took up 6 courses in the major. the remaining 4 courses were electives, and 3 were allowed outside of CIS. those courses were mostly offered in the same semester, and would also have conflicts with required core courses.

Another problem is that most data scientist positions are filled by statisticians who will be giving you the job interview. Almost all of the questions will be around stats. i personally feel a mastery of those courses would be great, but they would also not help me land a job because improving LDA to run on small text input by using a variation auto encoder doesn't help me recite the formula for a t-test.