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Comment by Simorgh | Hacker News Reader

This is really stunning. I can't wait to commence to course. I finished a Masters from a top-50 worldwide university, and frankly, the approach to data science was mediocre at best. The NLP module notes were plagiarised from Stanford and we were quite happy with this! It gave us a break from 20 year old textbooks that set the plodding pace for the Data Mining module. And don't get me started on my deep learning dissertation. The only expert in the uni on the topic got poached by facebook halfway through the project. The universities are finding it difficult to keep up and are resorting to 'interesting' techniques to retain talent - witness the Turing Institute in the UK. They gave out titles to many professors in several universities a year or so ago... as I gather, as a precursor to pivotal data science research.

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I applied for Masters in ML , in one of these univ ,

CMU, UT Austin, Georgia Tech, UCSD..

I am not in US, thought getting MS in one of these would boost chances of getting into something like google brain, or Open AI..

Is it waste of time and money in your opinion?

If someone thought ^ this was sarcastic, sorry, I was just genuinely wondering wether the exposure to top research in grad schools is worth investing

MS won't be so fruitful unless you do some research and publish (which is difficult and also many university don't support giving research work to MS student).

Its better to go for Ph.D. Remember for going into openai or google brain you need to be among top even after Ph.D.

I'll note that my MS was hugely useful and didn't result in publications directly. The mileage of your MS or PhD is dependent on many factors.

OpenAI and Google Brain, like most other more research driven deep learning institutions, are more interested in the results you can produce rather than the accreditation you hold. Publications obviously count but well used or written deep learning projects / packages would too. Many PhDs who come out having spent many years in academia still wouldn't get an offer from these places and many of the talented people I know in these places don't have a PhD either.

To the parent of this post, I'd also look into what I'd refer to as "Masters in industry" i.e. Google Brain Residency[1] and other similar opportunities. From their page, "The residency program is similar to spending a year in a Master's or Ph.D. program in deep learning. Residents are expected to read papers, work on research projects, and publish their work in top tier venues. By the end of the program, residents are expected to gain significant research experience in deep learning.". This is likely an even more direct path than most institutions would provide. Though obviously the competition is fierce, many of my friends who participated in this ended up with a paper in a top tier conference by the end of the.

[1]: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=147545...

The best way to get the attention of those companies is to do peer-reviewed, published research in ML. Which is certainly possible while getting a Master's at one of those universities.

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