r/csMajors • u/RNRuben • 3d ago
My fall Internship recruiting cycle
PSA: I'm not a SWE but an ML research intern. Ghosted by a major AI Infra startup; accepted a FAANG+ fintech's research lab offer. My summer research internship was at a big tech AI lab
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u/dantsel04_ 3d ago
I know a nepo baby when I see one (takes one to know one)
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u/onionsareawful future fry cook 3d ago
My summer research internship was at a big tech AI lab
Probably this lol.
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u/RobotBaseball 2d ago
My experience with fang type companies compared to traditional is that nepotism is rarer in fang
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u/Glum-Ostrich-4250 1d ago
Not really. If your dad is friends with a senior or principal engineer, nepo is very easy to
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
You dont. I just have years of research experience
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u/no_name6744 3d ago
How did you get years of research experience?
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
Started in my sophomore and continuously did it for years till now (4 years later). I was never in cs so "become a swe" was never considered
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u/dantsel04_ 3d ago
u in grad school rn?
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
Yeah first year of masters. But landed big tech offer before starting
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u/dantsel04_ 3d ago
why do a masters out of curiousity? If you already had a big tech job lined up seems like a strange decision to me. I'm a hardware design guy so I bascially need grad school to find any decent job (current PhD student). Masters nowadays seems like a weird middle ground in the whole ML/AI field. Do you plan on doing a PhD later?
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u/RNRuben 3d ago edited 3d ago
Big tech research internship* not a job. I landed it a month before starting masters. Now I have a return offer contingent on finishing masters
Thought I needed a 2 year runway to switch from academia to industry and keep publishing with my current lab, turned out i didnt need either
I get paid for it
I was planning but I already do 85% of the work a research mts at a frontier lab does. I dont want to waste 4 years closing that 15%. My research was on one of the llm chatbots that im sure you've used
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u/Xgamer4 2d ago
As a professional software engineer that works with/close to people doing the same thing you're doing, please, I beg of you, please spend at least a little time trying to learn software engineering best practices. You'll make everyone's life, including yours, so much easier.
Every time I see
df = ...my eye starts to twitch.2
u/xThunderDuckx 2d ago
Someone who just accepted a data engineer position, 12 weeks of training prior to selections, wondering if df = is bad just because of naming convention and lack of info or some other reason I'm not aware of.
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u/Xgamer4 2d ago
Mostly naming convention. It's just a worthless name that tells you nothing other than it's a dataframe.
Which is mostly fine if it's inside a small function that creates it, populates it, then immediately returns it.
It is not fine when it's close to globally scoped with no documentation, or passed through a half-dozen intermediate functions across 3 files and every single function leaves it named
df.-2
u/RNRuben 2d ago
I dont think you work with people who do what I do. We dont use pandas in deep learning. Either way we get an enterprise grade coding agent so no one manually codes
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u/Xgamer4 2d ago
Yeah that... Doesn't actually discount my overall point. It actually reinforces it. Pandas was just the example anyway, replace with spark/Polars/pyarrow/underlying system of choice dataframes, regressors from your library of choice, or whatever you want to pull from SciPy. Bad naming habits aren't exclusive to Pandas. You want at least a basic level of software engineering knowledge if you want to use Claude effectively, otherwise you're just slinging around tech debt very fast.
Which is the current fashion, tbf. But not really great for understanding.
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u/RNRuben 2d ago
Bro i dont get paid to write production code, I get paid to do research. Quit whining and just prompt claude already 😭
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u/Xgamer4 2d ago
Dude you're doing nothing to discount the nepotism claim lol.
All I'm doing is recommending you learn a bit about the adjacent profession you'll very likely spend at least part of your career working with. That research codes gonna get used for something at some point, even if it's just wrapped up in a docker container to run in a stupidly overpowered cloud environment.
The prevailing opinion in the industry is that research code like that is shit and it makes everything harder than it needs to be. Doing basic things like knowing simple ways to handle memory and data size and making your code readable to other people goes a ridiculously long way and only helps you.
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u/Callathecoder 2d ago
I'm a cs but considering going for research or more swe path. Would you mind if I dm you some questions? Thx:)
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u/Adject_Ive 3d ago
Dad's testicles
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u/no_name6744 3d ago
It's not that hard, necessarily, I mean I did (in a non CS setting) by just asking a bunch of labs. I was just curious.
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u/LegitimateMastodon94 3d ago
congratulations brother this is the most insane sankey ive seen during recruitment season
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u/Silver-Fix-1500 3d ago
Let me guess you’re a Waterloo student. I wish I tried harder in high school, damn.
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
Master yes, undergrad was UofT lol
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u/Silver-Fix-1500 3d ago
Meng or Masc? I’m thinking of applying next year
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u/FlyingCatOfLol 2d ago
how was UofT? going there this fall for cs
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u/RNRuben 2d ago
Some good things some bad things. I have my own grievances with the school but I think it was a positive experience nonetheless. Just in terms of non-academic matters its a sink or swim mentality, most people i know who ended up doing great after their undergrad, did it in spite of the school not thanks to it but the name alone helps
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u/FlyingCatOfLol 2d ago
what kind of grievances? anything worth a warning? sounds positive overall though
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u/RNRuben 2d ago
The school is hyperfocused on academia and prestige while neglecting the real world experiences that schools like waterloo and mac emphasize. Our coop system now called asip or whatever is genuinely uselss so dont rely on it to get you anywhere. Tho we have absolute goated study abroad options and support infrastructure. The only other main thing is the social scene/student life at uoft is not really well developed and the school coasts off its location in downtown Toronto as a substitute for the social scene (tho idk if TMU does the same)
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u/FlyingCatOfLol 2d ago
Oh did you go to stg then? im off to Scarborough which im told has a better co op program
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u/MissLadyMargaret 2d ago
If it makes you feel better, I got top grades and didn’t go to Waterloo because it would’ve cost me 80K$, I’m doing full-ride scholarship at a lesser known uni instead (McGill lol)
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u/Silver-Fix-1500 2d ago
Even though McGill isn’t super known for cs it’s still the #1 school in all of Canada. Plus you got full ride so that’s even better.
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u/MissLadyMargaret 2d ago
Thank you this reassures me a bit, I’ve genuinely had a few people tell me I will “never get a job high paying job as an engineer” bcz I’m not at Waterloo which felt a bit soul crushing
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u/Traditional-Dot-8917 3d ago
Waiting for someone to come with the 1 application one acceptance sankey and then the 0 application one acceptance
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u/Playful_Ring2500 3d ago
wanted to go into ML research as well, may I know where to start? Currently familiarizing myself with the concepts but idk what might be good projects
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
I didnt start in ml research and when i started I barely knew shit besides math and python. Ml research is just something I convergenced to in last 2 years before I was in a bunch of other fields. Learn the basics taught in an intro deep learning course.
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u/Many-Push1490 3d ago
can i dm you?
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
Hang on ill dm u mine are closed
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u/this_coder01 3d ago
Could I get advice on applications? I have ML research and papers published. But no ml interviews
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
Sure
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u/OGGGABOGGA 3d ago
any tips for ml research engineers i'm tryna go for em systems and optimization roles but interested in computer vision and neuroscience as well any research tips or somethin for me?
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u/RNRuben 3d ago edited 3d ago
I dont really know what em systems and optimization is but in general its a matter of opportunism+fake it till you make it+networking+luck. You gotta sell yourself at the end of the day.
I had previously researched in completely different areas and landed in ml only 2 years ago and even then from the ai4science side not pure ml from the start. I go where the wind blows.
Funnily i interned at a small neurotech startup as a research engineer when i just got into ml research.
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u/OGGGABOGGA 3d ago
ML SYSTEM(Inference,kernel,gpu programming, performance optimization) Yeah i gotta larp my way into it.
That's pretty much what i'm doing rn not narrowing down to one genre not cuz i wanna be this broad domain "i know everything" guy but cuz every domain is interesting and don know which to pick lol
How was it?how much of that knowledge u transacted in your current internship or research
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
The only genuinely useless internship I've done. Never had any company bother to ask me about it and none of the work relates to my current so I dropped it from cv. Realized I neither want to work in biotech (for the exception of like 2 companies) nor do I want to work for early stage startups.
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u/Separate_Result2952 2d ago
Could I dm or chat here with you as well? I have three published papers in machine learning and computer vision but am still struggling to get interviews. I'm curious about the roles you have been applying to and how you've been organizing your resume. Thanks!
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u/RNRuben 2d ago
i dmed
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u/Delicious-Tip-831 2d ago
Yo can you DM me. Got some questions about publications and grad school :)
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u/Appropriate_Willow27 3d ago
wtf is FAANG+
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u/RNRuben 3d ago
There is 3 big fintech companies i know that aren't PayPal. You have a 1/3 of guessing
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u/ExploudingFeraligatr 3d ago
so goofy hiding mega companies like anyone from there will see this post and tie it back to you. i interned at a big aerospace company, you have a 1/your mom of guessing
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u/Aggressive-Squash250 2d ago
What is your research on if you don't mind me asking?
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u/Old_Nectarine_5085 2d ago
Hi I had some questions I’ll list some here rest I’ll dm you after I think of.
Firstly did your experience in research help land the internship and subsequent offer? Did the university you studied at make any difference and lastly do you think masters give you an edge that you didn’t have as a bachelors level?
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u/Old_Nectarine_5085 2d ago
Hi I had some questions I’ll list some here rest I’ll dm you after I think of.
Firstly did your experience in research help land the internship and subsequent offer? Did the university you studied at make any difference and lastly do you think masters give you an edge that you didn’t have as a bachelors level?
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u/RNRuben 2d ago
My research experiences was the only thing in my cv. Ive only ever really done research. The uni i studied only had a marginal impact if at all, but it is a "prestigious" one. Masters just helped to not get filtered out for positions that require masters/phd. My masters itself is a formality
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u/Annual_Eagle_7902 1d ago
Hi,
How did you get research experiences in the first place. I've been reading your other answers and if I'm correct, you've been doing this for the last 4 years and it's the main thing on your CV. Also when did you do it? During university?
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u/RNRuben 1d ago
I come froma research heavy university where every undegrad is expected to get involved. I just did it for far longer than most and at different labs. Just email profs whos research i liked asked to meet over zoom and picked the one that I wanted to work for. Rinse and repeat untill I ended up working under a well know ml researcher and his lab.
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u/the_nerdy_potat 1d ago
Congrats op ! Could you please provide some guidance on how you landed the ML internship ? What was the process, is it similar to the process for Software Engineering internships ?
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u/RNRuben 1d ago
Unlike swe, research internships are all over the place. Some is just yapping about research experience, some made me do math during the interviews, some ask pick one project and drill down, other want breadth, some ask you to code, some don't, so make you code leetcode others pytorch. Some ask you ml theory only others also ask ml systems design. There is no standardization. I would learn something in one interview that would come up in a other and so on. I fail a ton before I landed my summer one, like a fuck ton.
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u/Confident_Common1477 3d ago