How to Sweet-Talk Your Machine Learning Prof into Blessing Your Thesis Topic

Will sweet-talk help to convince your professor? Image created with DALL-E

So, you have this brilliant idea for a thesis — an absolute showstopper that will revolutionize artificial intelligence, bring peace to the galaxy, and net you at least three Turing Awards (and maybe a cameo in a major sci-fi flick). You can already see yourself giving a TED talk titled “My Thesis Changed Everything.” The only thing standing between you and global acclaim is… your professor. Spoiler alert: convincing a professor is a bit like leveling up in a video game. You need patience, the right tools, and a good understanding of the boss’s weaknesses. In this post, I’ll share some insider tips on how to persuade your professor — while keeping the process fun and ensuring your final topic is something you’re actually excited about.

Don’t Overestimate the Professor’s Omniscience

Professors may appear to have cosmic intelligence, but trust me when I say that no one, not even the mightiest academic, can be an expert in all subfields of artificial intelligence. AI is huge — like, “the universe is big, but AI might be bigger” kind of huge. From deep reinforcement learning to Bayesian networks to natural language processing, it’s impossible to keep track of every new paper hitting arXiv (and believe me, they hit at warp speed).