As the spring semester is fully ongoing, I wanted to share my experience with an opportunity that GWU offers as a DC-based university and that rarely gets mentioned: the possibility of taking classes elsewhere through Consortium.

As a Data Science graduate student, I have become more and more fascinated by the ability of computers to process and understand natural language. Given the niche nature of such subject, it is hard for one university to offer several courses on it; hence, I took upon my program’s offer to use electives within our curriculum to take advantage of other schools’ instruction.

This semester I am indeed enrolled in a Computational Linguistics class, jointly taught by Professors P. Reisnik and J. Boyd-Graber at the Computer Science Department at UMD. The process to enroll was extremely smooth and tuition charges simply roll over; excluding a couple of extra forms to fill out, registration was almost the same as usual.

Of course, COVID has sadly prevented me to experience a new campus for a brief semester and personally meet new people. On the other hand, the online nature of instruction has brought some positive aspects in this case: there is no need to worry about the logistics to get to the new school or juggling schedules to make it to two campuses across town in a day!

I believe that Consortium classes are an important DC-unique academic offering that should not be overlooked, especially when considering which program or school to apply to, and which one to eventually opt for. We may often be indecisive given the different curricula offered by schools, and it’s helpful to know that DC institutions allow to easily take one or more classes elsewhere as part of your curriculum. In my case, the Data Science program truly satisfied my unique search for such a specific Master’s program that was not solely engineering-oriented nor business analytics. But, I have been able to take advantage of the Consortium architecture to expand my coursework in these departments at other universities to specialize even further in my chosen field, and network and meet even more professionals and students in said space.