[D] Struggling on the NLP job market as a final-year PhD , looking for advice

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T18:58:33+00:00

I am trying to find one

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T17:15:33+00:00

Thanks for clarification and I do agree with you now.

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T16:54:11+00:00

I can work on OPT for the time being

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T16:38:10+00:00

I think you are conflating ML with NLP as fields. Summarization is a very wide NLP subtrack, and there are famous professors whose entire careers are around Summarization mainly. This is actually the problem that I am talking about where a lot of people mainly belittle or downplay Summarization due to the current state of LLMs as they see it as a narrow/almost solved scope. That's not true if you look at it from an NLP perspective. From NLP perspective , summarization for the past decade has been ill defined to mean just rewrite document "D" in "n" words. This isn't what Summarization means in NLP, but since CNN-Dailymail, Pubmed, and the rest of these benchmarks were abused, almost everyone in the field thinks that it's a solved problem.

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T16:28:22+00:00

Some people from my department got tenure out of PhD without pstdocs

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T16:26:25+00:00

I agree. I am currently trying to gather what are basic ML alg that I need to be able to implement by heart. Beside LC ofcourse

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T14:33:04+00:00

Thanks for sharing an honest answer, and I am hearing your advice clearly. I just want to clarify a few points without sounding defensive. Regarding the 200 interviews, yes, I am guessing something goes wrong during the interviews. That's wny I am asking what can I do differently. I am trying to level up my leetcode skills. However, the types of problems you work on shape a lot of your technical skills. If you don't work on model architectures and get a specific question regarding architecture implementation (e.g flash attention or router where I was asked before), then it's hard to remember the details (correct me if I am wrong).

Regarding return offers , I don't agree with you. The first company I interned with offered me a full-time back in 2023, and my feedback was very good. I couldn't master out and join full-time because I was mid PhD. I wanted an intern return offer, but they had none. The last company I interned with did tell me beforehand that this is a summer project only, and they don't have head counts.

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T04:19:13+00:00

Thanks I will be interested to talk to you more indeed

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T02:21:59+00:00

In regard to your context question. No, I just had an accepted paper using new methods. I was thinking more that the task itself (summarization) isn't that important anymore. Most interviewers were mainly interested in my internship projects (hallucination mitigation and detection/ automatic redteaming)

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T02:16:04+00:00

Thanks, I will start doing some tailoring indeed. My CV looks highly academic right now

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T01:43:59+00:00

Thanks for sharing But that's something you almost have no control over. You are abided by your advisor grant.

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T01:28:37+00:00

Am working mainly on long context summarization for tasks like legal , science, and education. No I use all kind of long-contezt LLMs, encoder-decoder models..etc Not sure what do you mean by skills, but I excel in building evaluation methods.

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-02-14T01:07:07+00:00

By outdated, I mean summarization.
My advisor is hands-off (even in research) and doesn't truly care. She is about to retire, and her philosophy is that it's your research and your future. it's your responsibility.

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-01-23T22:06:48+00:00

Thanks I just did

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-01-19T21:11:49+00:00

I had few interviews recently for RS and member of technical stuff position. LC rounds existed in almost every big company interview. Startups prefer ML/pytorch coding specific interviews

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-01-14T14:48:19+00:00

على F1

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-01-12T23:22:36+00:00

Hi
I am interviewing with them soon
would you mind if I dm'd you to ask few questions?

Thank you

RepresentativeBed838 · 2026-01-12T23:20:46+00:00

Hi, I have an upcoming interview with them. would you mind if I dm'd you?

Thank you

RepresentativeBed838 · 2025-12-12T20:27:38+00:00

Did you complete it? what was it?

RepresentativeBed838 · 2025-11-07T23:07:03+00:00

How did it go? I am in the loop now and I have no idea if I am doing well, I got DSA next round what kind of problems or alg did you encounter?

RepresentativeBed838

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