| > I don't particularly love studying You need to introspect a bit more on what part of this is really true to you. You are already doing an MSc and that shows you are good at studying. May be you do not love pointless-studying. But no matter what degree you have in CS, you will have to study in your career to stay relevant in the industry > I have no desire to become a professor Good PhDs are usually good teachers. They do not have to be a professor and many are not. Teaching brings clarity of thought and improves your fundamentals. You could just ask your professors "why you need to be a teaching assistant" and check out if their answers make sense to you. > I have no desire to become a researcher...and I'm really afraid of getting a boring software engineering gig. Why pursue a PhD if you do not want to be a researcher? And who says software engineering has to be boring? You can chose what you want to work on and have just not found it. Obviously, a choice is easier for a PhD. But may be you can also look at being an entrepreneur (unless you dislike hard work) > I'm also absolutely sick of living like a student with little financial freedom. You have not even started on the financial part of financial freedom. > Does anyone have any guiding advice? My personal opinion - I find PhD to be too time consuming if it does not have a good purpose. I declined admission to PhD after working pretty hard towards that. I had been working on a certain topic of research for 3 years before that. My reason for declining was the quality of the faculties/mentors and the quality of research produced from the university. For next 2 years I did have second thoughts about whether I made a wrong decision. But I am happy with how my life turned out to be after that. However, if I had good faculties or good research produced I would have stayed Look at the quality of the PhDs coming out of your college/university. Also check out if their research is actual research or some kind of documentation. You could even talk to or interview a few people who have spend 2 or 3 years attempting the PhD. Avoid the ones in the first year because they are more likely to be unhappy with their choice in the first year. From your post, it just looks like you need a break. Couple of weeks off and you should be able to think clearly for yourself. |