A month after my graduation and exactly a year since I did it myself, I was asked to help as a teaching assistant for the MSc. course Deep Learning. Specifically, I helped with developing the assignments and the exam, and supervised 8 groups of students with their reproduction projects - which was (and still is) a major part of the course, in which groups of students (2 to 4) pick an article (closely related to deep learning) and reproduce part of it’s results.
Kick-start
At the time, I was thinking about (though not too much) what would be my next steps in life, which sounds more dramatic than it actually is: would it be another, yet more hands-on, educational programme, like woodworking, that, which I was seriously considering? Or would it be the usual: applying for a technical position in a company? And if so, which one?
Well, none of that would happen. Yes, I applied for ESA’s ‘graduate’ traineeship. Yes, I tried to think about how to make it financially feasible to do a woodworking programme. Yet, in the end, the feeling, that same feeling which vanished the summer before, of wanting to stay in academia was kick-started again by being hugely involved in teaching this course. I guess that especially the people I worked with (curious, driven, and friendly), the students (prone to learn and try-out + I like to explain and help), and my genuine interest in the prospects and curation of the scientific method we now call Artificial Intelligence, were in the end the decisive factors: I wanted to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, in academia and do research, and think deeply of things few people take the time for.
Around 3 months after the end of the course, I was offered a very nice PhD candidate position. Clearly, I accepted.