Parallel Distributed Computer Systems
Career prospects
PDCS is a research Master’s, which means that most of our students are preparing for a career in academic or industrial research. Many of our graduates continue their studies by obtaining a PhD research position at a top university. Others join industrial research laboratories. The PDCS programme is also an excellent preparation for students who are considering a different career path. For example, some students may want to join high-tech companies where their specific skills are needed for the execution of innovative projects. Others will be snapped up by firms looking for the ideal combination of engineering skills and creative problem-solving abilities. Some graduates have an entrepreneurial drive and start their own companies.
Graduates in demand
High-quality PhD candidates are in very short supply at virtually all university Computer Science departments in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Students who complete this Master's programme in PDCS are ideally suited to pursue a PhD in Computer Systems at many universities around the world. Well-qualified graduates in this field are also in great demand in industry.
Alumni careers
Andrei Agapi (Romania), PhD student at VU University Amsterdam
 I finished the PDCS program in 2006. I can warmly recommend this program to everybody, since I feel it has consistently contributed to my development as a CS researcher. One of the main assets of this program, besides the very interesting course curriculum, is the research-oriented approach it takes. We got the opportunity to take interactive and exciting literature study and discussion courses, given by the renowned faculty, as well as research proposal courses during which we were encouraged to develop critical thinking skills, priceless for any researcher, as well as identify important problems and come up with original solutions to them.
Since graduation, I have been a Ph.D. student at VU and my research focus has mainly been the Internet and ways to enhance the QoS that it offers, by exploiting various inherent features, such as network parallelism and existing routing policies." |
| Nick Palmer, PhD VU University Amsterdam
"I came to the PDCS Masters program because I wanted to learn to do research in computer science in the hope of continuing on to a PhD. I never expected to stay in Europe, but I enjoyed the classes and working with the faculty so much, not to mention living in Amsterdam, that I have continued on for a PhD at VU University Amsterdam. The program taught me not only about distributed systems but also about how to do scientific research. The skills I learned have helped me in my current research into using smart phones for distributed disaster management systems." Nick Palmer |
Upali Wickramasinghe Rajapaksa (Sri Lanka), PhD student at RMIT (Australia)
 "I finished my bachelor’s degree with a project on parallel computing. During the time of the project I found the field to be very interesting. Then, I became aware about a new masters course in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems at VU. This was exactly the course I was looking for! The PDCS course is a complete dose of scientific computing because of the course units, researchers in the field and resources. Currently I’m following a PhD program in Australia. The PDCS program has contributed immensely to my current research work because the program gave me a proper and methodical training to carry out research. These are in setting up experiments, collecting and analysing data in a comprehensive manner and presenting the findings. This training was invaluable for proper research in Computer Science." |
| Chen Zhang (PR of China), PhD student at University of Waterloo (Canada)
"PDCS courses and personalized research involvement provided me with abundant fundamental knowledge, hands-on skills, and most importantly, the zeal to carry on PhD level research on parallel and distributed computing area. I'm now doing PhD and just on the edge of finalizing the proposal for my own PhD thesis project. It wouldn't be possible, if not because of PDCS training, that I could have the horizon to systematically come up with such creative ideas with sufficient impact and feasibility as PhD project all by myself. I missed the days in VU very much and I recommend everyone interested in future generation network-integrated computing environments to enroll in PDCS master program!" Chen Zhang, P.R. of China (website). |
