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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Your list strikes me as significantly more than a typical master's degree would cover.

Yes, that list does look bit overblown. Most MS in US need you to take 12 classes, each of 3 credits = 36 credits to graduate.

Yeah, many would probably have to be broken down into electives, but if all of them were taken the graduate would be an extremely strong cyber engineer versus the current easy cyber degrees that are available now that do not really cover what cyber engineering employers are looking for. Most of the degrees are very general and do not go into depth or build a strong engineer during the process.

I would have to guess a Ph.D. in Cyber Engineering to start off near the Vulnerability Research work. Starting with a higher emphasis on research in cryptography, building tamper resistant systems, maintaining integrity and confidentiality on mobile desktop, server, SCADA and embedded systems.

Then kernel development, in depth work with creating custom applications that deal with TCP and UDP security and analysis, deep dives into the inner working on how various IoT devices work, building autonomous cyber reasoning systems, automated cyber ranges, and or automated policy client/server enforcement systems.

A PhD is about doing novel work and pushing the state-of-the-art, you can't get a coursework based PhD.

A Ph.D. is mainly about research, the courses you take leading up to your dissertation should still teach you more in-depth technology to help insure you are an expert in the field of the degree at the graduate level. Without this in-depth course load you will have weak research and would not have a good in grasp to be able to create anything new, state of the art that helps push the industry forward through advanced research along with being employable.

If you come in the door with these credentials you will be highly qualified to be at least a principal cyber engineer. Your in depth research would makes serious waves in the industry and with real world experience it would be an amazing win-win situation for you and the company that hires you, or even better your own business doing cyber research.

> A PhD is about doing novel work and pushing the state-of-the-art, you can't get a coursework based PhD.

That's the USA philosophy of advanced degrees; it does not reflect the practice of every country.

And given standard scholarly impact statistics for completed theses, it arguably doesn't reflect reality either. Maybe we should start admitting that most PhD candidates haven't made a significant contribution to the state-of-the-art, most future candidates aren't going to, and the nominal requirement to do so isn't helpful?

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