01-08-2025
The fellowship offering job-hunting grads an AI training lifeline
In early March, Volkan Çinar, a chemistry postdoc at MIT, received an email recruiting him to train AI models. Çinar studies carbon-carbon bonds formation in graphene. Given the stiff competition for jobs in academia, Çinar was no longer sure if his dream of working in academia made sense. So he was receptive to the email's pitch.
The email came from Handshake, the job search platform which connects 18 million students from 1,600 higher ed institutions to career opportunities, introducing its new MOVE (Model Validation Expert) Fellowship. The new program gives Handshake an entrée into the high end of AI model training, the hot sector that's seen Meta acquire a 49% stake in Scale for more than $14 billion and Surge bootstrap itself to $1 billion in revenue. For talent like Çinar, MOVE offers better money than teaching and comes with AI training. 'I'd never considered working in AI,' Çinar says. 'But given that I'm exploring other positions, I thought I'd give it a try,' even if it meant the risk of paving the road for AI models to take over his field.
What to expect from the program
The Fellowship's acceptance rate and pay range
How to make yourself competitive for an AI gig
A better way to source expert talent for AI labs
