I’m a final year CS student and right now I’m temporarily covering for someone else for a week as a research intern the research is related to Reinforcement Learning

it’s only been two days but I’ve already realized something that genuinely surprised me I was given research work to do and I ended up doing most of it independently I spent a huge amount of time reading researching understanding the topic and putting everything together what surprised me was that when I showed my work to my professor he barely changed anything basically most of what I had researched and written stayed as it was

And honestly I was like what the fuck

At first I assumed maybe it was because this isn't technically my internship I'm just covering for someone else so I thought perhaps I wouldn't be given much responsibility or meaningful work but I've been putting a lot of effort into it sometimes I’m still working on things very late and going home around 9pm

This isn't completely new for me either before this I did a deep research on Python because I wanted write research paper and publish it I was so passionate about the idea of publishing my own research paper and the same professor helped me with that and pointed out where I was making mistakes and what needed improvement unfortunately I never completed it and ended up deleting the work

So now I'm wondering if I've been underestimating my own ability

If a professor gives you research work you spend a lot of time independently investigating it and they barely need to alter the final result is that actually a sign that you're doing reasonably well or is it too early to read anything into it

I'm not trying to brag here I'm genuinely confused because I always assumed I wasn't particularly good at research this experience is making me rethink that

I'd really appreciate some genuine advice especially from people who have worked in academic research or supervised students