[craigzucchini]

Out of curiosity, had you done an undergraduate research project / thesis before getting into an MSc program? Also, what do you mean by a professional Masters? I'm still learning the jargon of academia. I'm sort of following a similar path, through dipping in and out of an undergrad CS degree now that I've sort of become disenchant with web dev. 27 now, but hoping to worm my way into deep learning in the Geospatial field or just some aspect of geo-spatial hopefully with some aspect of the work being field work or generally outside. I'm interested in having something sort of official like contributions to papers, and I'd like to put the deep intellectual interests and obsession with ideas to use. I used to have these with regard to frontend dev, but after re-inventing the same problem so many times, that's getting a little boring.

[josephdviviano]

Like the rest of my story I got super lucky and I don't think it's a repeatable path. I had done a small "research project" for course credit with a professor, but I don't think it counts for much and it didn't go anywhere. The way I got into the MSc was by emailing every single psychology / neuro professor at a university looking for a summer volunteer position! I was taking non-degree coursework at one after being unemployed for a while in order to upgrade my CV enough to get into a program. Back then I think I was aiming to get into something clinical. A new prof. at the time asked to meet with me for the position and then suggested at the meeting that I do a MSc with him. I think he was having trouble recruiting because the rank of the school was not very high. Luckily, he was also super smart and taught me a tonne. That was a research MSc. The professional MSc I am in now is quite new has more emphasis on coursework and not on machine learning research. It's a way for the school to teach a lot more students about deep learning without professors needing to dedicate too many resources to individual student supervision. There is no expectation to publish or anything like that, although there are always ways to publish if you are interested.

If you want to get involved in research projects (which I do think helps you land more creative jobs) I would suggest working your hard-core software dev background when you pitch potential collaborators. You would be very surprised to see the quality of code coming out of some researchers because there is little incentive to be a good software engineer in academia. The normal way to participate in research is to be in a PhD program but there are many other ways so long as you can work closely with people who come from a more traditional research trajectory.

Are companies in geospatial or government aerospace groups hiring people with your skills? Might be a first step?