Made an account to post this.
I stuck it out in a very junior research group and it set me back massively. I was too naive to realize the consequences at the time, and the PI was very kind and generous with their time, so I did not give it much thought and persisted with the project. Problems that resulted from this:
* Ultimately the research direction/guidance proved to be misguided, it was a deep learning project that only got good results with scale (as proved by competing teams from Nvidia and Microsoft) but the PI did not want me to explore that direction and insisted on me operating at small scale, where the model was too crude and the results nowhere near SOTA, I managed to replicate the toy models by the then SOTA publications but that was it.
* Because the PI has no repute, I had no good references for Ph.d applications. At the time I was not aware this was going to be such a problem.
* Because I dedicated all my time to this research, I did not do any internships or work placements or even prepare for job interviews or apply for jobs.
* I very likely would have been able to do research in a better lab if only I tried switching. I had good grades and technical know how. But I did not bother because I was too comfortable and the problem was technically enticing.
Result of all of this, is that I have accumulated some decent theoretical and technical know how, but besides saying that I did some research during my masters, I cannot prove it. It's not good enough for many Ph.d applications (no good references), not good enough for any industry lab (neither good publications, nor enough expertise for MLE/MLOps type jobs) and not good enough for big companies (not senior enough). Worth noting that I live outside of the US, where the landscape for juniors is not as forgiving.
It also did not help that I spent many months blaming myself for not getting amazing results with misguided constraints. And my persistence, which usually pays off, only made things worse. Lesson learned.
My moonshot was getting into a reputable Ph.d program. Currently unemployed.
