Originally Posted By: Tim
Which would probably be better in my case? I am leaning toward a software engineering degree (my other degrees are engineering based), but advice from people who actually know the difference would be useful.

I have to question whether getting a degree in either is useful, if your end goal is a Masters in OR. If the only reason you're looking at a degree in either is to learn "an advanced computer language," then I think you're barking up the wrong tree -- neither of those degrees are geared towards teaching you that. For example, in my CS degree, we used Pascal, C, C++, asm, Matlab, Modula-3, lisp, and a few others that escape me now. With the exception of the first-year classes, none of them spent more than a few weeks at the beginning of the semester going over the syntactic sugar of whatever language was being used in that class.

So your time (and money) might be better spent taking a few programming classes at a community college (if an official document is necessary) or just doing some tutorials online and then developing a small body of work that demonstrates that you meet the requirement (if an official document is not required), than spending 4 years earning a degree that's only tangentially related to medium/long-term goal.