I have Bachelors in CS from a good Indian University. However, I don’t have much experience in research. I want to enter the field. I am working as a SWE in FAANG, but I don’t see anyway right now to enter the research field even though I am really interested in it. How can I build my profile, or what steps should I take to navigate to ML and do solid research? I am not even sure which ML problem I am excited about as it was seems too wide. Any help is appreciated.
- Maybe consider doing a Masters?
- Switch internally to a team that does ML? They may not be doing ML research, but you might get introduced to some interesting problems which you can pursue later.
- There are ML residency programs run by big tech, although they are extremely hard to get into.
- Maybe try working as a Research Assistant with a professor. Checkout Post-Bacc/Pre-Doc research fellow program at IITM and IITB
- Try to implement research papers, start with the popular ones, eventually you might identify some gap.
- Yeah, I don’t want to go into debt immediately. Masters in India doesn’t seem too promising.
- I have been trying to do that for a while but it doesn’t happen unless there are openings on such teams. I am mostly stuck in my current dev work.
- They are definitely extremely selective. Too hard to enter for someone with no experience.
- Okay, I’ll check those out. I wonder if they consider students who aren’t enrolled in programs in those institutes.
- Implementing popular papers is little complicated, right? Especially since the experiments are mostly extensive. I have implemented quite a few models and have implemented concepts as a part of courses in my college.
The Post-Bacc research fellow at IITM and the Pre-Doc fellow at IITB is meant for people who aren’t currently enrolled there. It is a full time paid position.
Regarding your last point, you’ll find code available for popular papers, you can check that if you get stuck. Implementing papers is not as hard as you think.