What stood out to me even more was the "machine learning" buzzword - even though it doesn't seem like there's any guarantee that training a neural network would

What stood out to me even more was the "machine learning" buzzword - even though it doesn't seem like there's any guarantee that training a neural network would actually improve the modeling (and it's just another tool that the modeler should be able to decide on their own to use or not). Specifically, my advisor just suggested that I ignore this bit, and send in my resumé to those job offers anyway (this being something that we should be able to learn on the fly at our level anyway I guess...)