Master's Complete: MS in Software Engineering at Arizona
It's official. I've earned my Master of Science in Software Engineering at the University of Arizona. 🎓
I want to be honest about what this milestone is, because the honest version is the better story. I didn't set out to do a standalone master's. I came back to Arizona to do a PhD in Software Engineering, and the MS is the degree you earn along the way, the marker that the research foundation is in place and the doctoral work can really begin. So this isn't a finish line. It's a checkpoint. But it's one worth pausing on, because the road to it was anything but straight.
The long way around
If you've seen my timeline, you know this wasn't a tidy path: a CS bachelor's here in 2020, a few years building software in industry, a year in an MBA at Eller before I changed course, and finally the PhD program in 2024. Every detour felt uncertain while I was in it.
None of it was wasted. The years writing production code (APIs, the KMap migration, systems serving 50,000+ students worldwide for ICPC) are exactly what make my research questions feel real instead of academic. I'm not studying microservices from the outside; I'm studying problems I've had to ship around at 2 a.m.
What the master's actually represents
The coursework gets you the credits, but the part I'm proud of is the research foundation underneath the degree:
- A first-authored systematic literature review on AI techniques for microservice log analysis, accepted in the Journal of Systems and Software, where we screened 2,208 papers down to 82 studies to map the field.
- A co-authored multivocal study on microservice dependencies, also in JSS, synthesizing thousands of sources into a taxonomy of 28 dependency types.
- And the work I'm most excited about: graph-based LLM prompting for scalable microservice API testing, which earned 1st runner-up in the Student Research Competition at IEEE CISOSE 2025.
Three years ago "publish in a top journal" was an abstract ambition. Getting the MS means those weren't flukes; they're the start of a research agenda I get to keep building on.
Building on the side
The MS years weren't only research. I started two projects I care deeply about: Connecto, a real-time networking app for making the right connections in the room before the moment passes, and BDStudents, an effort to connect Bangladeshi students across the world so no one has to navigate a new country alone. Both came from problems I lived, and both keep me building outside the lab.
The people who got me here
Most of all, to my wife: thank you for walking this whole road with me. The path was hard. We did it with a new baby, through missed weekends, late nights, and everything in between, and you carried more of it than anyone will ever see. This degree is as much yours as it is mine, and you deserve every bit of it.
To my advisor, Tomáš Černý, and lab, thank you for the hard questions and for treating my industry instincts as an asset rather than something to unlearn. To my collaborators on every paper, who made the long review cycles bearable. And to the faculty and family who kept showing up through a couple of false starts, thank you.
What comes next
The MS closes one chapter and opens the real one. The PhD is where the questions get harder, and I can't wait. The thread I'm pulling on, making microservice systems more testable, observable, and maintainable, increasingly with LLMs in the loop, is one I expect to spend years on.
If there's one thing I'd tell anyone on a winding path of their own: the detours aren't the cost of the journey. Sometimes they're what makes the destination worth reaching.
On to the next chapter. Bear Down. 🐾