After spending some time in the industry as a Software Engineer, I decided to make a bet for the future. I joined the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), in the Netherlands, to pursue an M.Sc. degree in Data Science. I was fortunate to have the TU/e and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT) to fund my studies through two scholarships.

During the two years of the program, I acquired very important skills. Firstly, I learned about Statistics, Process Mining, Time-series Analysis, Data Analysis, and Machine Learning. Secondly, I had the chance to test my new knowledge in the industry in an internship at Achmea. Thirdly, I worked in a very ambitious research project under the supervision of dr. Joaquin Vanschoren.

My overall performance and the score obtained on my thesis, Learning to reinforcement learn for Neural Architecture Search, led to a cum laude mark. The research project was selected for an oral presentation at the NewInML workshop hosted within the NeurIPS 2019 conference.

Thesis defense at the TU/e campus. From left to right: dr. George Fletcher, dr. Decebal Mocanu, dr. Joaquin Vanschoren, and I.