[D] How hard is it to join a lab during Master's?

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.

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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:

  • good enough grades
  • a decent selection of courses that gives you solid background to understand enough math and theory
  • side-projects, interesting term papers, ba/ma thesis projects
  • network, get to know your lecturers, engage with them
  • recommendation letters are often a requirement. Just having good grades doesn't make you a good candidate for a letter. Wtf is the professor going to write? "He was good in my class" is just a weak recommendation letter, barely better than none at all.
  • try to particpiate in summer schools, there often is funding for it. typically, summer schools target phd candidates, but you can join them as a master student as well
  • if you're rich/well-funded enough, you can even attend academic conferences on your own/as a student
  • don't wait for research student jobs to be advertised. Go ask. That's how they're all gone before they make it to the job boards.

Probably more, but I can't think of more rn.

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Ok-Experience5604 OP t1_irbqlb0 wrote

Thank you so much for the detailed response!

>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 I understand correctly, funding is often a big obstacle when it comes to engaging students in research. This might be a silly question, but do you think that asking to be engaged for no pay, emphasizing you're very determined to gain experience would generally be a good idea?

>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

While I am in no position to try and aim for these places, it does make me worry that I would have to compete with an abundance of people with such qualifications at every step. I've recently burned myself trying hard to get chosen for summer research programs.

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curiousshortguy t1_irc2htk wrote

> This might be a silly question, but do you think that asking to be engaged for no pay, emphasizing you're very determined to gain experience would generally be a good idea?

Doesn't hurt to ask. A good approach is to see if the lab has a list of research grants on their website. Look at those, and you might be able to infer where funding is available. Same goes for the recent papers, they give you good indications. It's even better if you're taking a class and can engage the team via that.

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>I am in no position to try and aim for these places, it does make me worry that I would have to compete with an abundance of people with such qualifications at every step. I've recently burned myself trying hard to get chosen for summer research programs.

Don't be discouraged, you only need to be accepted once :D

To be fair, 75% your success in applications to Faang and Ivy League will be via recommendations and network. You have a full 2 years to build that.

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Prinzessid t1_irbhh6j wrote

Doing research as a non PhD student? I‘m not sure that is very common in the EU (or at least in germany). You dont really have the skills and experience to do research before completing the masters. Is that common in other regions?

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Ok-Experience5604 OP t1_irbhv8p wrote

Yeah, from what I gather in e.g. USA even undergraduate students are expected to have research experience and be published when applying to a well-known uni

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Prinzessid t1_irbjjon wrote

But that does not make any sense, how are you supposed to conduct mesningful research while still learning the basics? I feel like I knew nothing before the second year of my masters

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cyril1991 t1_irbu6d2 wrote

In the US you often have people who take a job after their undergrad/masters and then come back for a PhD. Undergrads can also help as free labor / paid summer interns, but are unlikely to be first author. Academia is also a rat race, and any kind of publication/student prize/patent/recommendation letters helps to “propel” you into better labs/better citation record/funding. Not having those isn’t the end of the world, and you shouldn’t compare yourself to others and worry about that.

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MrAcurite t1_irbqghg wrote

It's called "schools telling bright kids to fuck themselves for arbitrary and absurd reasons," it's pretty common in the US.

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Long_Two_6176 t1_irc2dtw wrote

You learn on the job. First year PhD students feel the same way

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[deleted] t1_irbqcjk wrote

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Red-Portal t1_irbwou6 wrote

The norms did change quite a bit. Undergraduate research programs are an official thing in many departments and undergrads with proper first-author papers are definitely not common but do exist. But this will wildly depend on the field.

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[deleted] t1_irby34u wrote

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Red-Portal t1_irbypcb wrote

Okay let me first explain how ML research works. Here, people are pretty anti-journal and most of the best work gets published in the so-called "top conferences." And yes, I have personally seen papers written by undergrads in those conferences. Before working in ML, I personally published a computer systems papers in our top journal when I was a junior undergrad. So yes, undergrads doing grad-level research do exist, including my past self.

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DeezNUTSampler t1_irbnqqr wrote

> You don't really have the skills and experience to do research before completing the masters.

If someone wants they can get the required skills and experience to do research any time in their life - depends entirely on the individual's capabilities and circumstances.

Fun fact, several researchers at OpenAI who led projects like GPT-2, DALL-E, etc only have a bachelors degree. Case in point, Alec Radford and Prafulla Dhariwal

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MrAcurite t1_irbqm7y wrote

Yeah, but OpenAI is a media circus manufacturing company, not a research lab worth modeling yourself after.

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Gordath t1_ircjpyu wrote

You definitely can do meaningful research and get it published as an MSc student, but you'll need to invest a lot of time and be driven enough. But the average student that is guided by a PhD student will most likely just end up draining more time than they contribute back (at least initially).

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vocdex t1_irde7rd wrote

Yes, that's what I was interested in too.

I am really confused about what you are supposed to do at European Master Programmes. Is Master's only about taking courses, just like undergrad? That sucks!

In Japan, for example, students join labs from senior year in undergrad and some even gets published.

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