I can only hope this wasn’t a highly competitive internship that more qualified (in the sense of having done similar work) students were passed over for. Majority of ML students regardless of speciality should have applied experience even if it’s on a smaller scale imo.
You will certainly face an uphill battle when trying to compete in ML these days. A huge percentage of the people getting into top tier ML programs already have 1-3 papers in those conferences so you would need an incredible connection to even make it through most screening levels for an internship. I definitely wouldn’t say it was a failure or waste but I think you set yourself up poorly and then allowed that to compound when it didn’t work (by repeating the action/goal rather than resubmitting and getting publications in other conferences and journals). If you wanted to get into one of those careers I would suggest staying in your program for another year or doing a post doc but if finances are important right now then you have to prioritize. Nobody can really tell you what is important to you so I would say it’s about deciding what is important and choosing that rather than letting life happen to you.
Are you going to make assumptions on the statistical distributions in order to make such tests accurate? Part of the reason nobody does this is because it’s arbitrary and irrelevant in many cases due to incorrect application of standardized methods. Combine that with the fact that it’s expensive to perform and has no real value for researchers it doesn’t really make sense.