Originally posted by: gopunk
What are you going to research? How to spend $20k a year and not have any income? To do that you should be an econ major...
Seriously though, are you going to develop new programming languages? Or maybe you want to write open source stuff? Or write some shareware?
I really cant see any advantages to going to grad school. You might as well start your own business and do stuff there or just stay home and do it. At least then you dont have to pay tuition!
well... you can get income from being a TA (free tuition...)... jobs.... all sorts of things. there are people that put themselves through grad school, it is not like it has never been done before.
as for what someone might research, what do they want to research? i'm personally not really interested in developing a new programming language... i was looking at AI, but am now thinking about theory of computation...
and you can do research on your own, but then you don't get to work with all these world renown professors/experts, which makes things more difficult imo. and if you have a company, you have to introduce a certain amount of evil

as in, unless you're a huge company like intel or ms, you probably will need to work on research with more short-term benefits than long term. but basic research is very important imo, which is why universities are so important.