My wife and I both went to graduate school and had very different experiences. I have a few major takeaways from what happened to us: 1) I was a "failed" PhD s

My wife and I both went to graduate school and had very different experiences. I have a few major takeaways from what happened to us: 1) I was a "failed" PhD student that left with a masters in mechanical engineering. Now I have a Software Engineer job that I love. A lot of credit for that goes to the software I wrote to run experiments as a grad student, and I am very happy with where I ended up. 2) My wife and I compared our advisors and they make a huge difference in your future prospects. Her post-doc advisor sent >95% of the people from his lab to tenure track positions. My advisor was successful at finding people jobs in industry and ran a great lab, but produced 0 tenured professors from his lab in 30 years. Look at where graduates of a lab end up before joining if you know what you want to do. 3) The academic job market is competitive in a strange way. Top candidates are clearly top candidates. Schools will get ~100 applications for an open position, but the top candidates will get job offers at nearly all of the places they apply. I don't think most job searches are weighted that way. 4) Research faculty positions are strange. You nominally get the job by being good at science, but then your job is to run a small business (your research lab). Being a good writer and good manager are probably the most important for running a successful lab, and PhD programs should probably focus on nurturing this more.