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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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