Thank you so much for the detailed response!

>Sometimes, labs also have funding for student researchers. They do work that's not part of their thesis, and that's much rarer, and in most countries, the pay is shit compared to jobs in industry (I guess: welcome to academia).

If I understand correctly, funding is often a big obstacle when it comes to engaging students in research. This might be a silly question, but do you think that asking to be engaged for no pay, emphasizing you're very determined to gain experience would generally be a good idea?

>Ivy League like places where currently a whole pipeline of FAANG engineers pushes their high-school students as interns through a pipeline to have their names top-tier conference publications before they even graduate high school

While I am in no position to try and aim for these places, it does make me worry that I would have to compete with an abundance of people with such qualifications at every step. I've recently burned myself trying hard to get chosen for summer research programs.

Yeah, from what I gather in e.g. USA even undergraduate students are expected to have research experience and be published when applying to a well-known uni