> This sounds a lot like you are telling us what you value in life. That's true, just as you're telling us what you value in life (e.g., the opportunity to lea

> This sounds a lot like you are telling us what you value in life. That's true, just as you're telling us what you value in life (e.g., the opportunity to learn to learn). However, I'm suggesting that it's be beneficial to enter into a PhD program with a long-term perspective. You seem to be actually discouraging that, or at the very least, claiming it's irrelevant. I can't really see a scenario where that's good advice. In fact, that's exactly how I entered a PhD program fresh out of college: without much direction or a long-term goal in mind, except to learn as much as I could and enjoy the experience. I enjoyed the experience, but I would have benefitted (during the program and after graduation) by aligning the program with my long term goals. Besides, your counterparts who ran the corporate treadmill will only be incrementally richer than you anyways. Of course, money isn't everything. But to be honest, that's definitely not the case. I have several friends who hustled after college or enrolled in professional degree programs. They now make multiples of what I can ever hope to earn as a "research engineer." Other friends saved up during those years and now own a house. Realistically, I'm still several years from owning a condo. If you really want to be rich, you need to take on big risks such as starting a company or the like. Talking about putting your wife and kids in a tough spot! And we've circled around to yet another example of the opportunity cost of spending 5+ years (perhaps before the wife and kids) in graduate school. (As an aside, I've heard that grad school is about "learning to learn" before, and I'm not convinced. Yes, I worked on problems to which nobody knew the answer. From my perspective, that's not significantly different from working on a problem whose answer is at the back of the textbook. The internal process is the same. Most successful graduate students I knew were reasonably smart, and worked very hard, and eventually made progress. Did I need to spend an additional five years after college to tell me that "intelligence + effort = progress"?)