Submitted by Ok-Experience5604 t3_xxd733 in MachineLearning
I am about to take part in the upcoming admissions for a master's programme in ML/NLP/CL in the EU. I have received many tips on how to choose a Uni/programme with the goal of becoming a competitive PhD candidate later on.
The vast majority of these tips boil down to looking up Uni's labs and seeing how active they are in the area that I am interested in (NLP). The thing is, when I check the people tabs of these labs' websites, all I see is a wall of people that are at least doing a PhD. It is extremely rare for me to find a Master's or Bachelor's student there.
That being said, is it just insanely hard for a non-PhD student to work with a lab to eventually get published, or is it just that this kind of collaboration doesn't really qualify one to be among the "official" list of affiliated people.
Also, any tips on getting published during M.Sc. are very welcome.
Please do excuse my obliviousness, I will be coming from a country where the academic culture does not exhibit engaging undergraduate students in research.
curiousshortguy t1_irbnvzk wrote
It really depends on the country, the EU is not quite as homogeneous at it seems from the outside.
Typically, master students are expected to write a master thesis, and that often is research-focused. Often, they're supervised in a daily fashion but a PhD student with a professor being responsible. This happens in the labs, but because every student goes through it, these students are not always listed as lab members (because they aren't).
Sometimes, labs also have funding for student researchers. They do work that's not part of their thesis, and that's much rarer, and in most countries, the pay is shit compared to jobs in industry (I guess: welcome to academia).
If you want to get published and don't happen to find a lab that's hiring students: Choose a good thesis topic where the lab is 1) doing research 2) you contribute to an ongoing effort in the lab 3) you are supervised by someone who wants you to succeed (i.e. your project isn't a side-project, or very specific nieche follow-up), and 4) you make your ambitions clear from the beginning.
Don't expect the supervisors to give you an idea that end-to-end will lead to a publication. You need to use your own judgement, and your research on the field, to make a somewhat educated guess.
Unless you're trying to join Ivy League like places where currently a whole pipeline of FAANG engineers pushes their high-school students as interns through a pipeline to have their names top-tier conference publications before they even graduate high school, you'll end up being a decent candidate with:
Probably more, but I can't think of more rn.