Elliot Hicks, Machine Learning in Science MSc graduate
The Machine Learning in Science course at Nottingham was the best time I’ve had in academia. The content, staff and projects were fantastic.
What was the best thing about your course?
"One of the main things I liked about the course was the consistent freedom in projects. For example, if I wanted to learn about reinforcement learning, I could choose coursework that lent itself to a reinforcement learning solution. This freedom not only allowed me to learn the best approaches for applying machine learning to real-world problems but also allowed me to find the niches of machine learning I enjoyed most."
What opportunities did your degree provide?
"During my time at Nottingham, I was fortunate enough to be invited to assist some of the Machine Learning in Science (MLiS) staff on a project with an external company, Oakbrook Finance. I then went on to research, train and evaluate a cutting-edge Natural Language Processing model for sentiment analysis. This work provided invaluable opportunities for me as I was able to connect with and present findings to Oakbrook staff in an industry environment. Crucially, this was my first piece of work experience in the field of machine learning and it gave me a huge advantage when applying for positions after graduation."
Did you feel supported while studying at Nottingham?
"The MLiS staff’s expertise covers a wide range of topics and they work hard to be available to support students whenever possible. Even now, a year on, I still like to stay in contact with staff from the course and sometimes I still ask for advice when I’m stuck!"
What did you do after graduation?
"Following my masters, I secured an internship working as a Deep Learning Researcher where I trained physics-informed neural networks for industrial applications. I even got to present to large companies like Google and NVIDIA. Now, I work as a Machine Learning Engineer at a healthcare AI company where I work on computer vision algorithms for medicine.
The advantages the MLiS course gave me when joining the industry can’t be overstated, I use the content I learned on this course every day at work. I have no doubt that the wide range of knowledge, skills and experiences that this course gave me were indispensable to the start of my career."
Go further
Find out more about our Machine Learning in Science masters