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Is Graduate School Useful in Today's World?
An anonymous reader wonders: "gradschoolstory.com has an entry on the Top 10 Reasons to go to Graduate School in the Modern World. Why did Slashdot readers go to graduate school and what did they get out of it?"
I wore scruffy clothes and thought mind blowing thoughts. I ended up with some great stories and nothing of any value for my resume. This happened to 90% of the folks who entered with me. All of us had to go reinvent themselves and take jobs that they could have gotten without a PhD. All of us work alongside people with bachelor's degrees and one even works for a man who dropped out of his undergraduate college to study calligraphy. Unless you have a real desire to study one particular subject, I think you should run as fast as you can away from graduate school. It's great fun if you're already sure of what you want to study. But if you're going to tread water, do it in an office where they pay you a real salary. The universities are filled with professors who make $200k/year, presidents who make $1m and grad students who make $10k. Plus, it's a terrible ponzi scheme. Remember that the professors need warm bodies to do the work that brings in the grants. They don't get paid until you get there. But once you graduate, you become competition. So they want you to check in and never leave to be a success.
My $0.02 anyway.
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Graduate Assistantships are usually your best bet for making it through graduate school. As a GA, I made around $1500/mo, which is peanuts for an engineer, but it took care of living, food, and the bills; my tuition was also paid for in full because of the position. At some of the larger, more prestigious universities, it's common to have professors with $1M+ grants that need research assistants. Granted you'll be a bitch boy for the professor, but he or she will often take care of your expenses in return, especially if you do a fair amount of work. Fellowships are also fairly easy to come by if you have a fairly decent GPA, GRE scores, and work/research experience. Applying to UCF, I was offered a $10k/year fellowship beyond a GA position.
The Gov't also has what's called a Palace Acquire program, for civilian employees, where you work one year, then go off to school for two years, then work an additional year. During those 4 years total (or 3 if you only take 1 year to complete a masters), you are paid a steadily-increasing salary, along with free tuition up to a certain dollar amount (you couldn't expect $150k for MIT). The only catch is that if you already have one technical masters, you cannot use the program to obtain a second one or work toward a PhD. In this case, most people use that to obtain an MBA, or a similar degree, to go off into the private sector and become upper-level managers.
While the Taulbee Survey has very reliable information, it polls only CS departments which grant PhD degrees. CS faculty who teach at four-year colleges and universities, who spend more time teaching and less time bringing in their body weight in gold grant monies, earn substantially less than Taulbee numbers.
Better to
"Sucking it up" by foregoing partying and vacations might do it for bachelors.
"Family" was obviously not one of the things on your list.
I've plenty of friends who've tried to go back to grad school while keeping their full-time job.
Many of them gave up at some point.
For most of the others, it took them 5 years to get the degree, and they said they did not have the time to enjoy it at all.
The way to succeed with this seems to be to wait with working full-time, and work part-time until you complete your MS.
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