New ask Hacker News story: Math PhD to ML Engineer

Math PhD to ML Engineer
4 by varane | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi, I'm stuck in a weird career-life situation, hoping someone can give me insights on what to do. Question: How do I best prepare for getting an ML engineer role after a math PhD? Kaggle, open-source, something else? Should I become proficient in PyTorch? Just implement a bunch of ML papers in my personal github? Context: I'm considering transitioning into tech industry after I complete my math PhD in 18 months. I have done enough research already to get a PhD so I'm just waiting until my advisor's funding runs out and also hopefully, the tech industry starts hiring well again. I have done ICPC in college and can solve leetcode mediums reasonably fast, but I don't have ML engineering experience. My advisor doesn't allow internships so that's not feasible (not great, but that's life). Why career change? I'm not interested to go the professor route, tenure track jobs in math are incredibly hard to get, plus I have a family to take care of, so I desperately want some certainty/money in life. I have taken a few grad-level ML classes in university and they're a lot of fun, also there's a lot of VC interest in ML now so seems like a safe bet. I also have a couple of first-author ML papers in top conferences but they're very theoretical - convergence bounds and such, so I don't think employers would be impressed.

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