| 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. --- [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. |
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.