This may be obvious, but I wanted to ask anyways. Currently I’m considering my grad school options, mainly so I can work as an ML Engineer afterwards. A lot of the schools I’m looking at have professional/non thesis options. I was wondering, would a non thesis masters hurt my chances of working in the ML field if I didn’t really want to get a phd afterwards?
I think it depends on whether you want to go into a more researchy or more practical MLE role. I did the capstone project track, and don’t regret it as it let me pursue a larger variety of projects, and I could also do an independent study that ended up being kinda Thesis Lite™. If you do a full thesis then the majority of your time in grad school will be spent on just one project, and a lot more academic research than practical engineering. It will definitely set you up better for doing more cutting edge stuff in the industry, which could potentially be more fun/interesting, but if you try to take your career in that direction then you’ll be competing against a lot of people with PhDs.