[dedicated]

I think what PG meant was many people go to grad school to wait out the bad economy while it's hard to find good jobs. Is that your case, or you always wanted to go to grad school?

The other poster said it right, consider your reasons for attending in the first place.

The final point that PG makes is investing in your own startup. If you have a solid team and execution skills, then by giving up on grad school and investing your youth and energy into your startup could yield better returns relative to "investing" later when the market is hot.

[doctoboggan]

I think I am going to avoid my student loans for a little longer. I would love to work for a small startup but I feel my EE degree would be useless, and too be honest I don't even know how to see out such employment. As my graduation date brings the time when my loans will start accruing interest closer I feel like my only option is to go to grad school or take an entry level engineering position at a large firm.

I don't see how I can fit startup employment or even creation into the path I chose 4 years ago. If only I could talk to myself 4 years ago.

[jackowayed]

That's absurd. I don't know how much you code or how good you are at coding, but if that's how you feel, the solution is to start coding more. Right now.

Since you're in EE, I'm sure you have have the basics of coding down. Even if you're kinda shaky now and don't know any of the hot stuff a lot of startups are using (Ruby/Python/etc), you can absolutely get to the point that startups would want you in a year of playing around on the side. Once you know the basics of coding, it's not all that hard.

I'm not sure what the market will be like in a year, but right now everyone is desperate for talent. You don't know how to seek out such employment? HN has a jobs section. Almost every startup you use has a jobs link in their footer, and they're all hiring. Check out GitHub jobs, StackOverflow jobs, 37signals job board, etc. Get yourself a little bit of exposure via open source contributions, blogging about technical things, Hacker News, etc. and they'll come to you.

As for student loans, though startups pay less, they still pay pretty high salaries, especially now when all the companies have cash and competition for talent is insane. As long as you keep living fairly cheaply (which can still be a couple steps up from a dorm, but may involve sharing housing, especially if you end up somewhere expensive like the Bay Area), I'm sure you can get an offer that would allow you to live and pay your loan payments. And then you're actually decreasing how much you owe instead of just pushing it off.

If you really want to go to grad school, go to grad school, but if you want to work for a startup but feel like you "can't", take steps to make sure you can.

[doctoboggan]

Thanks for the advice. I taught myself python this summer and am currently learning GUI programming with pyqt. I am also learning django and javascript/coffeescript. I recently contacted the developers of IPython to see if I could help out anywhere and I have been reading to source of the qt-console app they just shipped with the new IPython. My goal is to have some meaningful contributions by the time I graduate.

So although I sounded pessimistic in my post above, I am trying to turn myself into someone desirable to startups. But I still have the feeling it is too little too late. Here's to hoping I am wrong though.