What a Master's in Ireland Taught Me After Nine Years in Industry
20 October 2026 · 2 min read · by Malav Naik · Career
In September 2024 I started an MSc in Data Analytics at National College of Ireland. I’d already spent nine years working with data in India, most of them building SQL Server and Azure platforms at S&P Global. People asked why I’d go back to university.
A year later, here’s my honest answer.
Industry teaches depth, university teaches breadth
Nine years of work had made me very good at a narrow set of things: SQL, ETL, data modelling, dashboards. The MSc forced me into modules I’d never have picked on my own: optimisation, deep learning, generative AI, data mining. Some I loved, some I struggled with, and all of them widened what I could imagine building.
The field had moved faster than I realised
When I started my career, “machine learning” meant regression models in a notebook. By 2024, students were fine-tuning language models and building retrieval systems for coursework. Being in a room with people who’d grown up with these tools was the fastest way to catch up.
Experience is an unfair advantage in group work
Where I did have an edge was knowing how real projects fail: unclear requirements, messy data, stakeholders who change their minds. In group projects I often ended up translating between the technical plan and what the “client” actually needed. That’s a skill no module teaches.
The dissertation was the best part
My dissertation, Enhanced Personalized Learning Experiences by Leveraging Knowledge Graphs and Prompt Engineering, is published in the NCI research repository. Owning a research question for months, with nobody telling me the answer, was very different from delivering tickets at work. It taught me to frame problems, not just solve them.
What I’d tell anyone considering it
- Pick a dissertation you’d want to talk about in interviews. It becomes your portfolio.
- Build in public while you study. Coursework disappears; blog posts and repos stay.
- Use the city. Dublin has meetups for Python, data, AI and cloud almost every week. Go to them.
- Don’t treat it as a reset. Your industry experience is the thing that makes your degree valuable. Lead with both.
Was it worth it? Yes. Not because of the certificate, but because it changed what I believe I can build.