[Virax]

I have a full time job as a web developer, do not make open source contributions, do not have a girlfriend or a social life, and do have a healthy amount of free time. I spend much of my free time reading technical articles and textbooks in CS and finance (although I could be reading up on representation theory if I wanted to). I also program in my spare time.

Sadly, you've left out many of the details that would help others understand you: when did you graduate? What was your GPA? Did you take quantum or real analysis or a compilers course? If you wanted to, how would you prepare to finish your degree or begin grad school?

There is nothing particularly mysterious about hard work and devoting time to study.

[jperras]

I actually have 3 credits (equivalent to one class) in a non-science related field left to my degree, which I will be finishing in the next semester.

Most of the classes I took were honours level, and my GPA was quite average. My grades suffered a bit from me needing to work quite a bit to pay tuition, but that's not something that particularly bothers me. I learned much from working in the 'real world', and the few GPA points I traded for that experience has put me quite far ahead of many of my peers.

I took two classes in statistical mechanics (one graduate level), three classes in quantum physics (one graduate level), two classes in classical mechanics, one class in general relativity (graduate level) taught by a relatively well known cosmologist, and various other honours level classes in calculus, algebra, real analysis, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, as well as your boilerplate base classes physics and mathematics.

I've been thinking about going to grad school in a few years, perhaps in a more CS-related domain - I find Information Theory to be interesting, even if I don't quite understand everything that I'm reading.

I realize that I could drop everything and focus all of my efforts on study, but at this point in my life I'm not ready to do that. I am more interested in how others manage to strike a balance between life and an insatiable quest for knowledge, which is something I believe many on HN have to deal with.

[mechanical_fish]

I've been thinking about going to grad school in a few years, perhaps in a more CS-related domain...

Don't do it. Unless you want to become an academic, with all the attendant downsides and risks -- which you apparently do not.

It sounds like you've got the usual problem: You were used to school, you were good at school, you had thoroughly internalized the vague and quixotic goal of the student ("the insatiable quest for knowledge") -- and now you're up against the reality that school only lasts for a few years and the rest of your life lasts for decades.

The most likely outcome of going back to school is that you will spend a couple of happy years in the environment that you were raised in and that you are now missing. Then you will graduate and be exactly where you are now, except older, and poorer. I've seen this happen several times.

So I advise that you stick with your current plan. It sounds fine. Try reading more publications, try some scientifically-oriented open-source work. Do what you like. If you want to study information theory... keep reading! Buy more CS textbooks and teach yourself. Watch lectures on the web. Pepper your fellow HN readers with questions about Haskell or Lisp macros or whatever. Buy a subscription to Nature. Or work your own way through Knuth or the Princeton Companion to Mathematics or The Molecular Biology of the Cell. [1]

If you've got a good job and friends and romance and an open-source project, try to consider the possibility that you might be happy and successful.

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[1] These are all on my list of things to do. At my current rate, I will never finish. And that's fine. Nobody is keeping score.

[benatkin]

To add to this, also think about why you didn't thrive in the academic environment and get a PhD in 8 years, like some do. If you go back, what will be different?

I think for me, it was the boredom. There was the busywork handed out by the teachers, and the slacker culture that permeated the small state university I went to. If I hadn't been so bored, perhaps I could have stayed on the path.