I last read this article before I started grad school (in computer science). I'm reading it again, now, more than two years after I left. My experience was the

I last read this article before I started grad school (in computer science). I'm reading it again, now, more than two years after I left. My experience was the polar opposite, if the poles were bent around like a horseshoe magnet. Rather than suffocating under thick expectations, I was gasping for air without direction. My first advisor recognized that his lab's interests had shifted between my application and my arrival, so he gave me free reign to figure out where my interests lay for my first year. (The nexus of programming languages, concurrency, and logic, if you're wondering.) He moved on to another university, and as an introvert who'd barely been out of state without my family, much less on my own in another country, I chose not to go with him. I met my second advisor in a seminar course on static analysis and formal methods -- his first on joining the university. It was completely up my alley, and we got along really well. Given the situation with my first advisor, we were on the same wavelength about becoming his first official student. But he thought he was getting a grad student who had done real research for a year, and in reality I still had no idea how to approach research. He had to lower his expectations a few times, and since he started from an expectation that I wouldn't need much guidance, I never really got the amount of attention I asked for. We ended up parting ways with bad feelings. I can't really blame my advisors personally. I still don't know enough about the day-to-day of the academic system to judge. And I'm sure there are places where (and advisors of whom) you can expect more support. But my takeaway, from my experience and from this article, is that if you go in without knowing what you're getting into, nobody's going to be there to tell you what to do. You either luck into finding a sustainable approach, or you don't. I still want to go back to grad school. I think my experience will help me know better what my needs are and where those can be provided, and thus make me a less risky proposition for a university to take on. But I regret not taking a gap year to really dig in and understand the system I was going to put myself through. (EDIT: My advisors are good people, and I wish them well. I hope that's clear from what I've written. Things just didn't work out.)