Eh. Grad school gives you shit pay for insane hours on interesting, or at least worthwhile, work. Industry gives you good pay for decent hours on boring work if you're lucky and work that makes the world worse if you're not. You're probably going to be unlucky, because capitalism. In both cases you're at the mercy of stuffed suits you could replace with a moderately complex shell script if they weren't the ones in charge. I've bounced back and forth a few times and I still can't decide whether I hate academia or industry more. My student loans were paid off before I'd been out of undergrad 10 years though.
Why the fuck are you giving advice to someone who is a potential graduate student? Clearly, you never went to graduate school.
I've been in PhD programs in math and computer science. Then my stipend didn't cover family members' medical bills ('murica!) and I missed sleeping and I remembered I could be writing trivial CRUD forms for 40-more-like-15 hours a week and around 3 times the median income in my area.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I had to do a bit of a performance art piece, here. I thought it might be the best way to help him. In graduate school, everyone is guaranteed to fail at something. Honestly, I had already figured you're some kind of a sysadmingodmindcrypto, or maybe even a pure mathematician, so deal with it. And those don't come out of Phoenix University, usually. ...Is grad school just like this for me? edit: sorry about the line above, I have to remind myself that the demonstration is over
^THIS^ piece of shit again?! Hahah, wow. Fucking tool.
#gradschoolthread edit: the demonstration is now over, thank you! I mean, it's pretty bad, man. :(