Hi, Marios.
It’s a problem that lots of people have when they graduate from college. Getting your first “real” job in your desired career is always a challenge: you can’t get experience without a job so if you can’t get a job without experience, it’s a trap. There are a couple of general approaches people take to get useful experience:
Doing internships with companies as summer jobs during school is a great way to get job experience during your education. Check with your university’s recruiting or placement office to see if they have a list of companies looking for summer interns. The other major way is doing your own projects either through school or on your own to both develop and demonstrate your relevant skills. I would say that your thesis project sounds like an absolutely legitimate ML/DL project. If you can get that to work successfully, that is a non-trivial accomplishment and I would think there is a good chance that a potential employer in the ML space would consider that relevant experience. You can also extend that idea by finding other projects to do on your own that will both help you learn to apply ML/DL techniques and also demonstrate your experience. One way to find suitable projects is to look at some of the current “challenge” projects on Kaggle. I’m sure there are other sites that offer challenge projects also, but Kaggle is one of the better known ones. Or you can use those as examples and find some area that is personally interesting to you where ML/DL techniques can provide meaningful solutions to “real world” problems.
Of course while you’re doing that, you can also take more courses to widen your knowledge. Data Science and MLOPs are huge and growing areas with lots of jobs. DLAI provides specializations in both of those areas.
DLAI has had several online events where they have addressed questions like the ones you are raising here. It would also be worth following Prof Ng’s The Batch Newsletter (if you don’t already) to keep informed about what’s going on in general.
It’s a big market out there. With the academic and project experience you have, I hope you will be able to find a way to get started on your first real job! Keep us posted on how it goes.
Regards,
Paul