As a student researcher, I worked in the Google OCR team (16 hours per week, from the Google Japan office or home). I surveyed the TextVQA task (Visual Question Answering with text recognition) and implemented part of the baselines.

It was an interesting experience, but I quit for several reasons. For detail, my contract was extended until my graduation (2023.3), and my manager suggested that I work as visiting researcher after graduation.

However, I quit because a full-time position was not guaranteed. Unlike an internship, the student researcher had no option for conversion to a full-time position. Furthermore, big tech layoffs were suddenly increasing.

Under the situation, I should have quit being a student researcher and planned for another future. Currently (2023.4), I am working as a postdoc at the University of Tokyo and slowly finding a full-time researcher or software engineer position. I will focus on ongoing research projects for several months and start to apply for jobs around August.