[zerokyuu]

Also seems odd that there were no collaborations or internships with businesses. People in my lab have interned in research labs at IBM, AT&T, and Telefonica. Additionally, we've worked on projects with people from Google, Akamai, Vuze, and Skype. These seem like pretty decent opportunities to establish contacts and fairly typical (at least in CS). On top of that we've also collaborated with researchers at other universities.

Sure the majority amount of my/our time is spend sitting and working in the lab, but going to a few conferences per year, doing an internship most summers, and having weekly meetings with other researchers adds up to establishing a lot of contacts in the research community that I wouldn't have without graduate school.

[lutorm]

This very much depends on what field you're in. You'd be hard pressed to find business internships in astrophysics.