Sven Spehr

7 karmaJoined Pursuing an undergraduate degree

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Progress in understanding the human brain could significantly advance our ability to treat neurological and psychiatric diseases, many of which currently lack effective interventions. Computational modeling and large-scale data analysis are increasingly central to neuroscience, but they are often limited by available computing power.

I want to work on the computer science side of this problem by specializing in High-Performance Computing. 

I'm currently an undergrad, doing some research on program autotuning and compilers, which is the closest I can get to HPC at my university right now. This winter, I’ll be doing a Software Engineering internship at Amazon, and after finishing my degree next summer, I'm debating between:

  1. Pursuing a master’s degree in HPC or related areas, to dive deeper into the technical problems.
  2. Building career capital in big tech, and potentially reorienting toward brain-computation work from a stronger industry position later.

Does this seem like a sensible plan? Are there particular pitfalls or opportunities I might be overlooking?

Thanks in advance!