mikaelsouza

So, for the past few years, I've been struggling with depression. I am already taking care of my mental health doing therapy and taking prescripted meds for depression.

A few weeks ago, I had a depressive crisis where I couldn't do anything related to study/work and kept reflecting about life for a few days.

With help from my psychiatrist, I noticed I had set up impossibly high expectations for my life and because of that, everything I accomplished always felt like it was nothing or it felt like it was something already expected for me to accomplish. Because of that, much of what I do feels empty and does not give me pleasure.

I'm 26 and I'm finishing my Master's Degree, researching NLP, but it feels like there are not many jobs which I could work as a researcher where I live. I also don't feel prepared to move to another country to join a big company (I want to work at MS someday lol).

All of that makes me feel like what I am doing is for nothing and that it has no meaning. I also feel locked into a path which I don't enjoy much anymore. While I want to work as a researcher, to learn more and make use of all I've learned until now, I want to try other things related to computers.

It looks like I've been rambling for a while. I am not really sure what I wanted to accomplish writing this, but I think the main points are: * How to fix my expectations to make accomplishments matter? * While NLP is an interesting topic, it feels like there are not many opportunities where I live; * I want to try new things besides Machine Learning, but I feel locked in this path already. Maybe it's already implied, but I am not from the US.

I've been working on the Punctuation Restoration Problem for my Master's Thesis, however, me being primarily a programmer at heart, I wish I could use some of my NLP skills to solve issues related to programming in general.

I know Microsoft does lots of research in NLP and I think after they acquired Github, they have an immense dataset to work with for any problems they want to tackle. Most recently I think they did a great job on their new python suggestion extension on VSCode.

So, could you suggest to me some issues you think are interesting research topics? This is something that I would like to work with, but I have no idea where to start yet.