YamEnvironmental4720 t1_j2qr952 wrote on January 3, 2023 at 7:31 AM

Most people have commented on how a person of your age would be viewed in academia and in industry. I'd like to take a different perspective: what kind of thesis you would produce.

This is of course impossible to say for sure, but the following questions may be of relevance:

How has your master thesis been going, and how enthusiastic have you been working on it?
Have you already been suggested a topic for your thesis, and to what extent have you been able to influence this choice of topic?
Do you struggle with procrastination?
When you procrastinate, do you find yourself doing things that could perhaps be developed further into useful skills for the job market?

notyourregularnerd OP t1_j2qur34 wrote on January 3, 2023 at 8:16 AM

Hi, Thanks for taking out time to give actionable advise.

My masters thesis is going okay, I have made sufficient progress to graduate but I am on my own for my masters thesis. I felt that had I gotten support I would be able to get a paper out of it. For context I do my masters and also thesis at TU Munich Germany. The prospective PhD advisor was impressed with the topic of my MS thesis (very likely reason for him to extend me a position).
Yes, I was suggested a topic for my PhD program. There is some room to choose a topic within the broad area but the PhD advisor has recently moved from another institution to current one after graduating everyone there. So I am his only PhD recruit and he is hiring a post doc on a very well defined topic in game theory for ML robustness. The prof subtly hinted me to choose same topic.
I do struggle with procrastinating but since last years I have gotten better. However, the final results are not that impressive. I will explain that in context of my masters thesis. I have tried to be on my toes with my thesis but I still feel it is going on a very snail pace because I often get stuck and there is no obvious solution to my to-do tasks. I know that my advisors don't have ready made answers but I felt that any brainstorming on ideas would have helped me move faster and produce work that I would be legit proud of.
Yes, in times of procrastination I often watch tutorials on more practical aspects in CS like system design and software engineering. I believe I can also build a structure to learn these skills when I get stuck in my research.

YamEnvironmental4720 t1_j2qww2y wrote on January 3, 2023 at 8:44 AM

I am not surprised by the limited amount of mentoring for your master thesis. I know that doctoral students are supposed to be very independent in Germany in comparison to many other countries, at least in more traditional academic disciplines. Maybe it is a little different in ML. Anyway, there seems to be the prospect of some brainstorming with the post doc, and there will be other PhD students, even if they don't have the same advisor as you. So, chances are that you would enjoy your PhD years more than you have been doing working on your master thesis.

Since you mentioned that you may drift towards more practical aspects of CS when you get stuck, you should also consider how much you enjoy programming. Can you easily sit for hours with your own hobby programming projects, almost not noticing how time passes? If this is the case, you would perhaps be more happy working on implementing ML techniques in industry than analyzing the theoretical aspects of it.