I attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles beginning in the fall of 1981. I received my masters degree in Geophysics in 1985.
USC is a private university. Tuition is very expensive. I wouldn't have been able to attend if I had to pay for it myself. Fortunately, I was a Teaching Assistant for the first two years, and a Research Assistant the third year. As a TA/RA the university waved tuition and gave me a stipend of $700 a month. The fourth year I had already started a job with Union Oil in downtown Los Angeles, and while I didn't have to take any classes, I still had to pay for "thesis credits".
While a TA, I taught a course called "Earthquakes". It was really "Geophysics for Non-Science Majors" but if we called it that, no one would have taken it.
Also while at USC, I got paid for doing various little computer project for people in the department. The most rewarding was setting up a computer to digitize the shape of sand grains for Fourier analysis.
My degree required a thesis. Its over 230 pages long, including the index, which was mostly computer code. (Fortran no less.) Its title is Wavenumber Filtering of Gravity Data and its Application to Interpreting Structure in the Western Transverse Ranges, California. If you actually read it, let me know.