I just read the first half of it, and want to ditto how engrossing of a read it is. I followed the path in his prologue: a BS/MS student with a lot of internsh

I just read the first half of it, and want to ditto how engrossing of a read it is. I followed the path in his prologue: a BS/MS student with a lot of internships, which were mostly uninspiring but less uninspiring than school. Always vaguely disappointed that problems weren't "big" or "intellectual" enough (something I kind of look back on in shame). However, I took a different turn by getting very "in" to the engineering part of software in my last two years. This led me to being purposefully selective with my last internship and eventual job search (optimizing for hard problems, interesting business models, and OSS/mature infrastructure), and I ended up very happily in industry, satisfying my intellectual curiosity at work and on the side. And yet, I have always wondered what it would have been like to be a PhD student instead. From this narrative, it sounds very similar to being a junior engineer: you don't really know what's going on, and you're dependent on the graciousness and good will of more senior people to point you in the right direction, until you can build a compass of your own. Thank you very much for this link, it's like gazing into another branch of the universe for me.