I am set to graduate from what could be the top public school in Egypt this summer, and I am in a bit of a situation. I’ve mostly focused on ML during my college years, unfortunately this was partly driven by the immense hype surrounding it. Over the past few months, I’ve been wanting to pivot to systems (e.g. HPC, distributed computing, compilers), since these were the courses I enjoyed most at uni and the ones I found less empirical than ML, which I am starting to get disillusioned with. There is no real systems industry in my country, so I figured the best way to achieve this might be pursuing a masters, preferably in canada (good funding opportunities, less politically volatile than US, more systems opportunities than Europe). This is a long shot, and I want to make it less of one (I‘m already getting severe imposter syndrome just scrolling through this subreddit). Here‘s my profile:
- 3.4/4 GPA :’)
- non-trivial open source contributions to an ML graph compiler, which could be a good bridge to systems
- 1 solid systems project (a mini OS kernel, part of coursework)
- my bachelor’s thesis set to be published in my school’s journal
that’s about it, pretty weak. no other related research or internship experience, since there is relatively no industry in my country for that niche.
I have 8 months to work on my profile so I can apply for fall’27, anything after that will mean that I have to stay in Egypt for another year to do military service instead. I think what could help my profile the most is research experience, but how can I get that? Is it normal to reach out to professors asking for remote RA opportunities given my profile, though with genuine, targeted emails? Do you recommend anything I can do in these 8 months to help my cause?