- You get to meet and work with people who are pretty clear about what they want.
Utterly false. Most people in graduate school have no idea what they want. They're there because they couldn't think of anything better to do. - The rest of the world suddenly takes you more seriously.
Only partially true. Yes, having letters after your name potentially makes people not immediately blow you off, but that's about it. It generally doesn't translate into more money or help you in any way when it comes to actually getting people to do stuff that involves resources or money. Moreover, we're in the midst of an anti-intellectual backlash, and in a lot of circles, having a PhD = "being out of touch with the real world." People holding this opinion are often referred to as "conservatives." (I'll resist the urge to digress into another rant here...I will say that, at the very least, the non PhDs have proved that they, too, have no concept of how the real world works. See Iraq.) - You can use graduate school as an ideal environment for beginning work on a startup.
Horse puckey. Yahoo, Google, and Sun were given as examples of startups started by graduate students. Let me point out that 1) all of those were in the lead up to or in the midst of the dot-com era, and as such shouldn't be taken as general examples of, well, anything, and 2) I suspect those startups were started in part because their founders were fed up with grad school and wanted to do something "real."
Most good startup ideas in tech don't require state of the art research. They just require applying known techniques in a clever way and presenting them in a compelling, useful-to-business light. If you want to do a startup, go do a startup. Grad school isn't "pre-startup" world. (An exception to this is biotech, where almost all novel research can end up being applicable to somebody, somewhere with a lot of VC funding). - You can use graduate school as a pivot to change your career.
True insofar as you want to pivot towards something vaguely academic (i.e., either academia itself or an industrial research lab). Won't help you much elsewhere. Some people will, in fact, not hire you in lower-level technical positions because you'll suddenly be overqualified. - You get to pick your choice of work and your work hours.
Ha! Not quite. More flexibility than a corporate job, perhaps, but come a paper deadline, your "choice" of hours will amount to choosing whether to sleep between 4 and 6 am or between 5 an 7 am. - You can get involved in projects that can actually impact the real world.
Utter horse shit (most of the time). Research is about exploring "what-if's." There's a reason those are what-if's, and it's because they're ostensibly _not_ "actually-are's." Studies occasionally have impact (UWashington's spyware study, UCSD's Diebold security analysis, etc.), but most of the time the path from research to something that vaguely even touches reality is very long and very winding, and quite often doesn't even connect. This is one of the fundamental things you need to be at peace with before even considering a graduate degree. :) - You can get involved in projects that have absolutely no impact on the real world.
There we go. Much better. This one I wholeheartedly agree with. Not having to deal with idiot business-folk is fan-fucking-tastic. - You can do things that you missed out on in your undergraduate school. It’s a second chance.
No, it's not. It really isn't. If you're expecting this, you will be disappointed. Graduate school is a very, very different endeavor. Undergrad is about giving you a base of knowledge and a basic set of analytical tools. It's about breadth. It's also, in the US at least, an exposure to peers who come from wildly different backgrounds and have wildly different interests. Graduate school is about depth. You try to learn as much as you possibly can about a particular area, and you even try to push the boundaries of knowledge within that area. You are surrounded by other people who are interested in roughly the same thing you are, and those people have much more varied ages. They may not interact with you at all if they have families. - If you’re good at what you do, you can count on being invited to travel around the world to conferences and seminars.
If you're good at what you do, _and_ you're lucky, your papers will get into prestigious conferences, and then you'll spend your time scrambling to find the money to actually attend said conference. Also, once you get there, you'll likely spend all your time in a windowless conference room being bored by most of the other work presented.
(depressed yet? :)) - You get to be the TA this time around.
Alternatively: you _have_ to be a TA this time around. It's fucking hard work, man!
All that said, I'm really, really looking forward to grad school. You're surrounded by really bright people, not weighted down by business demands, PR departments, and assinine corporate policies. You can study whatever you want to, and you have the freedom to tell the rest of the world they're full of shit (just don't say that to your advisor). And to some degree, yes, you can just get up on a Wednesday and decide, "You know what? I don't fell like working today. Fuck it. I'm spending the day in front of the xbox." Now, that might mean you spend your weekend making up for that sloth. But hey, at least you can do it.
Basically, you just have to know why you're going and what to expect. If you do, it can be a fantastic experience.
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