[glomgril]

As painful as it can be at times, it is a truly beautiful phase of life during which your main obligations are to become an expert in something that interests you and to make enough money to not starve and have a place to live. If you are single, coming directly from the "broke college student" lifestyle, and end up at a university with a good stipend, it won't even feel like you are "poor" and the money is mostly enough. But the life of a grad student in a large public university can come with much more financial instability and heavier teaching loads from day one, with less time for slacking off and letting ideas marinate. Less so if you are in a field/have an advisor with good/consistent funding. The devil is in the details.

Wouldn't change it for the world though, and anecdotally most people I know who ended up finishing the PhD feel the same way.

Main shortcoming of the (American) grad school experience imo is lack of preparation to join the corporate workforce (in my field, there are easily >10x the graduating PhDs each year than there are available university jobs). Academia has done a terrible job preparing grad students for the harsh reality of a non-academic career. Keeping this in mind throughout grad school will help a lot -- you can see the difference in non-academic career trajectory between people who had a backup plan and those who didn't.

[thatfrenchguy]

> But the life of a grad student in a large public university can come with much more financial instability and heavier teaching loads from day one

Depends on whether you won federal grants though, although most of those end up thrown at PHD students from Ivys and Stanford (sadly?).