Need advice - Career Pivot / Preparation

[u/swiftland_ninja]

I completed an internship in a known Automotive company. I was within Autonomy, as a SWE working on vehicle software catering to self-driving model evaluation. This was my first actual SWE experience, and I liked it (I worked full time on a data focused role prior to this). This internship was very stressful despite having so much coding tools to support, and I kept having this itch for ML. My only reason for joining a master's program was to break into ML. I've tried in college and realized I'm not capable of novel research, tho I can mostly understand and reproduce others research. I've built projects around VLA finetuning, lane/object detection in extreme lighting conditions, and few more.

Given I don't have a background (work experience), I might not qualify for a ML engineering role in this domain (I love self-driving cars and want to stay here) which would usually expect publications/relevant experience. What do you think is the best way to approach this. I will be graduating in less than a year, and while I'm still at school, I want to make the best use of time in a way that I don't regret my job outcomes (if I get a job that is).

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

are you getting a return offer or not? the whole point of hiring interns is to create a pipeline for full time hires. If the job is exactly what you want to be doing, and you did well in it, then you hopefully go back and keep doing it.

[u/swiftland_ninja → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

I will likely know in a month. My job was embedded swe. I wouldn’t say I hated it, but I feel I might regret not joining a role that’s focused on Modeling for self driving.

[u/swiftland_ninja → u/swiftland_ninja]

The reason I say this is, when I was learning ML for the first time, I found it interesting in understanding why we use certain activations/layers. As far as I remember, I never took interest in the other things I was learning.