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Ok-Experience5604 OP t1_irbhv8p wrote

Reply to comment by Prinzessid in [D] How hard is it to join a lab during Master's? by Ok-Experience5604

Yeah, from what I gather in e.g. USA even undergraduate students are expected to have research experience and be published when applying to a well-known uni

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Prinzessid t1_irbjjon wrote

But that does not make any sense, how are you supposed to conduct mesningful research while still learning the basics? I feel like I knew nothing before the second year of my masters

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cyril1991 t1_irbu6d2 wrote

In the US you often have people who take a job after their undergrad/masters and then come back for a PhD. Undergrads can also help as free labor / paid summer interns, but are unlikely to be first author. Academia is also a rat race, and any kind of publication/student prize/patent/recommendation letters helps to “propel” you into better labs/better citation record/funding. Not having those isn’t the end of the world, and you shouldn’t compare yourself to others and worry about that.

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MrAcurite t1_irbqghg wrote

It's called "schools telling bright kids to fuck themselves for arbitrary and absurd reasons," it's pretty common in the US.

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Long_Two_6176 t1_irc2dtw wrote

You learn on the job. First year PhD students feel the same way

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[deleted] t1_irbqcjk wrote

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Red-Portal t1_irbwou6 wrote

The norms did change quite a bit. Undergraduate research programs are an official thing in many departments and undergrads with proper first-author papers are definitely not common but do exist. But this will wildly depend on the field.

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[deleted] t1_irby34u wrote

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Red-Portal t1_irbypcb wrote

Okay let me first explain how ML research works. Here, people are pretty anti-journal and most of the best work gets published in the so-called "top conferences." And yes, I have personally seen papers written by undergrads in those conferences. Before working in ML, I personally published a computer systems papers in our top journal when I was a junior undergrad. So yes, undergrads doing grad-level research do exist, including my past self.

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