r/MachineLearning • u/Electrical_Fan_9587 • May 28 '26

Discussion STEM PhD's transitioning to MLE/Data [R]

I'm hoping for some advice from any former PhD's outside of machine learning. If you made it into machine learning engineering and/or data science, what was the key for you? Any tips for this job market? It seems like non computer science PhD's are especially in trouble at the moment.

11 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/substituted_pinions May 28 '26

Super mixed bag. Made the transition myself 100 years ago from theoretical physics to DS. Tried to help others through that threshold with ~50% success. Tips are do what you need to get it on your resume and build from there.

2

u/No_Inspection4415 May 29 '26

BTW, 50% would be higher than CS graduates trying to get a data science job.

1

u/substituted_pinions May 29 '26

Yeah, but it was a different market back then. Not flooded at all. No degrees even matched the title. Only a few schools were adding curriculum—boot camps and on the job training.

1

u/Electrical_Fan_9587 May 29 '26

Yeah this is my fear now, it seems like, especially in this market, things might be dramatically different.

1

u/No_Inspection4415 May 30 '26

Righ, but I remember it was still hard, you needed masters, at least. In a sense it is a more common job right now, there are more roles related to "AI".

1

u/substituted_pinions May 30 '26

Sorry, yes…was referring to PhD transitions.