How to get into PhD program [D](reddit.com)

I am currently a cs graduate student at a top university after completing a comp eng undergrad there My thesis is more to do with embedded system security and maybe applied ml Unfortunately I didn’t get into any ml focused graduate program as they’re extremely competitive even with good grades from a top undergrad (and some projects of course) I want to do a PhD in ml as I’m currently having a tonne of fun taking optimization and ml courses - further I’ve been studying it for years already I think my interests lie mostly in optimization ie shampoo, soap, hessian free/approximations Also inference optimization is pretty cool but I’m more of a math person even though my undergrad was in computer engineering I enjoy learning about things like pca, lda, other stats techniques on my own I’ve had about 7 internships but they were all in software except one where I did a bit of ml near the end ie fitting decision trees to data Currently I couldn’t get a job after 1 year of applying so I’m in a masters program at my school. I have 0 publications and my supervisor puts out maybe 1 paper every 3 years so it’s unlikely I’ll get one from my thesis, if I’m lucky I could do some sort of anomaly detection paper but even that’s unlikely (t-test is pretty much unbeatable) What steps should I take to get into a PhD program after graduating and what classes should I take as my math background feels like it’s lacking when I read something like the shampoo paper submitted by /u/proturtle46 [link] [Kommentare]