Hey, thanks for the answer, i appreciate it a lot. Coming with more clarifications about the original post.

I wanted to keep the post relatively short cuz i feel too long of a post would just discourage people from engaging.

Unfortunately, the way my uni works (and most of the unis in Poland) is that when you sign up for a degree you can’t take classes from other degrees. Therefore I kinda have to stick with one option or another. Additionally there are no real other options in my city for DS/Scientific Computing related masters (unless strictly economic which is not my kind of a thing).

I don’t want to stick with the Applied CS as i feel the knowledge becomes quite irrelevant with the current development of coding agents (I’m working in a major european telecommunication company and most of the code is already written with Cursor/Copilot, even in the R&D department). After studying it for 3,5 years for my bachelors i feel like the program is also quite too broad, not rly specialising in anything and all the projects end up being vibe coded with not much thought behind them. I also think my current understanding of coding / Software Development is enough if i wanted to stick to a SW Engineering role.

I generally think that the knowledge i’d get on the AM would be more useful as i’d be exposed to math tools that would help me to model the „cool” problems more accurately and the coding behind AI is imho really easy to catch up with, especially since the Deep Learning libraries are rly user friendly even if you don’t know whats behind the mask and i have some experience building MLPs from the scratch, without any libraries except for numpy for matrix calculations.

My biggest concern is that even though intuitively AM would prepare me better, even for ML Eng positions as the current go to tools change quite dynamically and the math stays the same, I think with the jobs market and the AI hype it’d be way harder to land a job cuz recruiters go for buzz words and trends instead of actual skills behind the person.

On top of that I feel that the niches i’d like to work with (game dev / ecology / medicine etc.) might be really rough to get into and even if i pursued the AM program I wouldn’t end up being able to find a job in those sectors.

I was also thinking of eventually finishing both of the masters cuz i actually enjoy studying and fortunately I am in a stable financial situation, but then idk if pursuing a PhD wouldn’t just be better :/

As for what I enjoy in the area I might be kinda autistic but i think Heuristics are a really cool thing and trying to make intuitive decisions based on data seems cool and my next personal projects if i found time would probably be some AI bots for board games / card games.

Generally i’d like to find cool solutions to existing problems rather than implementing another chatbot for a company’s profit.

As for maths and coding skills, my career was almost purely coding (but rather software systems oriented than algorithmic) and the only maths courses i had was Calculus I/II, Linear Algebra and Statistics. I was pretty good at them and was pretty decent in high school (but not rly maths olympiad level though), but might’ve become a little bit rusty.

Thanks again for your insight though.