That was my first thought too. I'm about to finish my masters program and I spent the first half thinking that it was just hyperparameter tuning, until I sat down and learned the math and theory. Now it's so much more interesting and explainable. That random tuning is now much more calibrated from experience and understanding the theory. (As of now), I could easily make a career out of this, because it's not random and simple optimization. Plus, the field is so hot right now, that it's unreasonable to assume that what data scientists do now is what they will do in 5, 10, or 20 years

My answer is less refined than some of the other ones, and my experience with RL is minimal, but wouldn't the action space be too large? Could you contain it to any word/phrase (near infinite space)? You could try limiting it to single letters, but similar to how CNNs work, you'd be missing out on the relationship between letters and you'd still have a 26 character action space, assuming you don't use punctuation or numbers. My friend spent two years working on a RL algorithm with only a 6 action space... I can't imagine 4x that

You'll do fine. I'm in my final quarter of a 2 year masters in cs program with no undergrad experience in CS. My undergrad was in engineering which helped, but my friends undergrad was in psychology. Enjoy the ride!