I'm getting my PhD in Machine Learning right now, so I'll try to give you some ideas. First of all Machine Learning will be useful to you, because you'll under

I'm getting my PhD in Machine Learning right now, so I'll try to give you some ideas. First of all Machine Learning will be useful to you, because you'll understand much about statistics, data mining, optimization and efficient programming. If you don't get to work on an ML project in industry directly, some of the enabling techniques might come in handy. Now, ML is also interesting for industry. Google is essentially a Machine Learning company. They use statistics to evaluate and display data, be it website ranking, recommender systems, or whatnot. Some goes to some extend for MS, Facebook and Yahoo. Now, there is also increasing demand in the computational biology community for ML methods. Pharma companies are producing terrabytes of data that will need to be analysed with intelligent algorithms, so that might be an interesting direction to consider. In times of unlimited data access, studying how to teach computers to learn from data seems like the right thing to do.