| I see that you are looking for something quite different from what I expected -- you are thinking more along management lines than technical ones ("Program/Project Managers at Google/Facebook"). You're right that a PhD is probably not for you and MBA later on might in fact be what you want. So I'd suggest you maximize your chances of getting into a good company right now that you could see yourself in for a few years, which would let you get into a good B-School. Also, since you need the money to pay for loans etc., joining a startup is not for you either. Most startups will not pay a high salary for employees, and the visa issue will remain. Also, unless you start a company yourself, I'm not sure how much of a management role you'd get, since typically the founders will be the ones directing the major decisions. I can't really say much else as this career path is quite different than the ones I know best, but I wish you all the best. P.S. Regarding research being implementable -- it depends a lot on the field you're in within CS. A lot of graphics advancements do in fact get picked up by industry, and fairly fast as well (6 months to an year). However, in general the commercialization of research happens in one of three ways: 1. A researcher is at a research lab (MS/Goog/etc.) and passes it to a dev team at their company. Examples are PhotoSynth at Microsoft or Adobe's Seam-Carving paper. 2. An academic researcher starts a startup with their research to commercialize it. Example: google. 3. Some company seeks out and implements promising papers they see from academia. This is rarest, but for startups could provide a huge competitive advantage. I think it's unrealistic to assume that other academics should implement and/or commercialize their research -- it's a very time-consuming process and that's generally not how they want to spend their time. Coming up with new ideas is their job, and naturally they will try to optimize for that. |