@Thomas_Ponnet thank you for joining this thread. I was actually going to make my own perspective on this one, but re-aligned little bit to address your point. Hope this helps.
During my Masters, we also had this type of ‘job fairs’ that the school invited HR managers and key officials from Fortune 500 companies. After decades as a full-time engineer in a large and a few small institutions, so on the other side of the ‘job fair’, I can tell you that the events are not really designed to hire ‘top brains’. It was more about introducing the company to students that we tell them we are in play. 999 out of 1000 cases, you won’t be getting a job offer on that day.
Unless you have charm to attract recruiters, it won’t generally be easy to have the company’s attention. You have to have selling points, first of all. The selling points usually come from what you do personally (not what schools teach you), and the school’s education is to give you a foundation for your personal task.
If you are just a fresher from a bootcamp, your foundation must be shallow, meaning that your chance to win recruiters’ attention will be dim. And, I don’t think such students will tab SIAI’s admission.
What I recommend you is to build strong foundation, be it SIAI or any other prestigious schools with in-depth scientific studies w/ math for AI. And then, post your toy projects to your Github. Act like you are already a full-time professional while conversing with other experienced members when sharing codes or exchaning ideas. Unfortunately, most full-timers don’t spend much time on Github, but still, when I got your resume from HR and search your name on Google, I want your Github to be full of math-driven codes with sharp reasoning.
In STEM fields, your school name is less emphasized. What’s really a key is how good you are in foundation so that you can be versatile in whatever the project that your employer is working on.
With SIAI 2.0, what I have proposed to the team for the networking events is that we should call up senior researchers for sharing what they like from freshers instead of creating ties with HR teams. I am not saying inviting HR teams is valueless, but STEM students need more bottom-up than top-down.
@KeithLee earlier in our discussion mentioned related requirements for admissions to MSc AI/Data Science, but we have eventually moved to a simple exam on basic mathematical statistics. If we were not a school but a company, I guess @KeithLee’s recruiting points would have made more sense. The same logic should be shared by your target companies ‘ex-post’ SIAI.
Sorry to be a bit opinionated, but I guess you get my points.