How to know if a research-oriented role is for you? [D]

I’m currently a first-year Master’s student in Data Science & AI, and I’m trying to figure out whether a research-oriented career is right for me. So far, most of my experience has been in applied machine learning. None of my internships were formally titled “ML Engineer” or “ML Research,” but the work itself was pretty applied ML-heavy. During undergrad, I was also part of a research lab where I worked on a computer vision project for manufacturing. That mostly involved training a CV model, an