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Google Brain Residency Program

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Re: Google Brain Residency Program

#11
post #10

I stopped here: The residency program is similar to a top Master’s or PhD program in deep learning. If you accept that a Master's program is contained within a PhD program, and this residency is similar to a PhD program in deep learning from a top school, then this would be the fastest PhD-like (revised from equivalent which is too strong of a claim) program ever. Only 12 months and a google badge!

[deleted]

fixed!

Re: Google Brain Residency Program

#12
Given questionable academia politics, low to non-existent pay for PhD candidates as TAs, grants being mostly consumed by the school, profs acting as middle managers rather than true mentors, race to the bottom for quantity over quality of papers because of desperate PhD qualifications in order to then jump start careers (not to mention wasteful research for the sake of a PhD badge)...I think this is a great initiative.

Re: Google Brain Residency Program

#14

I stopped here: The residency program is similar to a top Master’s or PhD program in deep learning. If you accept that a Master's program is contained within a PhD program, and this residency is similar to a PhD program in deep learning from a top school, then this would be the fastest PhD-like (revised from equivalent which is too strong of a claim) program ever. Only 12 months and a google badge!

Perhaps the idea is they want an APM-like program but for deep learning researchers. The APM program has been pretty successful, and a lot of deep learning progress boils down to tuning architectures and dealing with overfitting and other domain problems. This sounds like a good opportunity for a practitioner, and all the recruiting spin is in place to attract adventurous candidates who might be open to deviating from the traditional grad program grind.

Re: Google Brain Residency Program

#17
At what point does it make sense for Google-likes to educate their own workforce, skipping the university model entirely? They've already created a B.A. substitute by sponsoring Udacity's nanodegree programs, and now they're working on the other end of the spectrum with a masters / PhD equivalent.

Assume these companies have an excellent selection process (obviously a big 'if'). Could they pluck bright students straight out of high school, send them to two years of specialized super-accelerated Google School, and have a molded and productive employee come out the other side? They have the resources and the expertise, and there's only so many Stanford grads each year.

A workforce of bootcamp devs sounds unpleasant - but with skyrocketing tuition costs, and ever-increasing demand for 'only the best' talent at these companies, there's probably a point at which it makes economic sense for both employer and employee.

Re: Google Brain Residency Program

#19
post #12

Given questionable academia politics, low to non-existent pay for PhD candidates as TAs, grants being mostly consumed by the school, profs acting as middle managers rather than true mentors, race to the bottom for quantity over quality of papers because of desperate PhD qualifications in order to then jump start careers (not to mention wasteful research for the sake of a PhD badge)...I think this is a great initiativ…

Such examples and on one of those grad forums and other places like Reddit about how horrible and how political grad programs are (I mean PhD mostly) I must say it added a lot to my decision of not trying for a PhD (maybe ever).

Is it an accepted environment in academia by now and very widely known and people still go for the same environment? Or people, students, don't know how it is actually there, or the severity of it, and then kind of get trapped because of that mild ignorance, so to speak? Or, is it just the hope that - oh that place cannot be that bad? Or is it really not this widespread as people make it out to be, or as it seems to be (to me at least)? Just curious (I'm not a grad school guy; just an MS aspirant who also wanted to do a PhD but now not).

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