I Made Over $100 From my M.Sc. Thesis in a Month

All it took was some re-writing and some code refactoring

As of this writing, I am a Master’s student in the final stages of writing my thesis. If all goes well, I should get my degree soon. Fingers crossed. However, I will not write about my Master’s degree, specific details regarding my thesis, or any specific details regarding my education. This story is about turning a task that I was required to do for my education into a revenue stream.

Background

I have been studying data science and machine learning for five years now. I’ve taken graduate-level courses on machine learning and artificial intelligence in my undergrad, many online courses, and two years of study at the graduate level. In addition, I’ve worked in the industry professionally for three years.

Over this time, I’ve learned a lot about data science. There is a lot of information out there, and the learning curve can be pretty steep. My goal is to share as much information as possible so that aspiring data scientists can learn from my work. And for this reason, I started writing.

Thesis

Because of my thesis, I did not want to write about it directly. Plus, I don’t think there is much benefit to the average data scientist writing about some esoteric aspect of the field.

Instead, I focused on the background information of my thesis.

This important required component details all the techniques that I plan on using for the thesis. This section is essentially a list of what I’ve learned over the past five years and the code I’ve built up during side projects and courses.

However, I don’t think that academic writing lends itself well to educating people. Because of its rigor, the intuitive understanding of concepts is buried in references, mathematical formulae, and complicated vocabulary. Instead, I wanted to write about the tools I was using for a large audience.

My plan for each article was roughly the following:

• Write about a concept I am using in my thesis in lay terms.
• Do not write about thesis-specific algorithms or problems.
• Include helpful visuals to support the explanations.
• Create copy-paste style code blocks in my free time for people to use.

This last point is crucial. It ensures that my readers will get tenfold the value regardless of my writing these articles. The code blocks are designed so that they’re plug-n-play. You have to enter your data or change the classifiers to regressors.

I encourage all students to start writing about what they know and share their knowledge. Don’t horde what you know. You can bring more value to the world by sharing your knowledge.

Monetization

Medium is a site that I have used for years. In particular, Towards Data Science has been an enormous help during my studies. This sharing of information is one of the beautiful aspects of the technology industry. And I want to contribute my share of knowledge.

Medium allowed me to quickly write about data science and share my work with publications. I started writing a few months back, but I was inconsistent and never made more than $0.5 a month. But in all fairness, I only had one story posted for a long time.

However, once I decided to view writing my thesis as an opportunity to practice and share my knowledge, I decided to write more actively.

In my first month of active writing, my articles made $60. I have had a 100% curation rate, and all my articles have been accepted into publications.

During this time, I’ve researched Medium quite heavily. So I suspect this type of meta-writing about Medium will tarnish my curation rate.

A small price to pay to be able to share this story.

Besides making $60 in my first month of active writing, I received a bonus of $50 for writer engagement. Medium had recently started providing bonuses to their writers. Many writers were happy about this change, but other wanted Medium to spread smaller bonuses across more writer.

Medium listened, and I made another $50.

In July, my first month of active writing:

• I wrote eight stories. One story made $36.
• I accumulated over 10,000 views and over 2,000 reads.
• My stories reached 70 fans, and I have 30 followers.
• And I made over $100.

Other Benefits

While being paid is a nice bonus to writing, they are other aspects that I believe are more valuable. However, I likely won’t see these aspects materialize for some time.

The first is that I can practice my writing and, as a consequence, improve my communication skills.

Communication is incredibly underrated in the data science community, especially among beginners.

Sure, you can implement BERT for your NLP problem, but do you know what is happening? Can you explain it to someone who is not technical? What is the value that this model is producing over another?

The answer to these questions is why data scientists hold so much value. It is why they are paid so handsomely. But the answers have more to do with the ability to communicate effectively instead of programming.

The second benefit is growing an online presence.

For a long time, I was hesitant to put my work out into the world. I was waiting for some unknown day in the future where I would be ready to share things with the world. Of course, that day doesn’t exist, and your work won’t always be good, but you need feedback from real people.

Now, I’m getting that feedback. And I’m getting more exposure. The increased online presence also adds another element to my portfolio and a nice feature to my resume.

The last benefit I found from writing was learning about how I can make money online.

I had read about this for years, about how people start their online businesses and do freelance work, and I wanted to experience it. But, writing articles was not how I imagined entering this world of online business. Still, it was the perfect entry point due to the limited barriers to entry.

I had to learn things I wouldn’t normally encounter daily, like SEO optimization (which still seems like a black box to me) and different business types available.

But then I made eight cents. So these measly eight cents meant that working online was viable. And I was more excited about these measly eight than any of the dozen friends I told about it.

Moving Forward

I’m going to keep writing. The plan is to go through my coursework and side projects and generalize the code to share it. I want my writing to provide value to people. I want it to save people hours trying to figure something out or getting the code just right.

The reason I want to share so much is that I want better data scientists. There are so many opportunities in the world for data science and many problems that need to be solved. If I can give you the tools to do that job better, faster, and more efficiently, that makes me happy.

If I can become a better writer and make a bit of money, that’s just awesome.

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