Should you go to graduate school?
Everyone is living life for the first time.
I am not a very social person, and I do not have many friends. Still, every now and then, someone asks me whether graduate school is worth it.
For general life advice, ask your favorite AI agent. These systems are, in effect, dynamical systems that converge to a consensus: the majority opinion of the many people whose writing they learned from. This post is for when you want something else, one person’s story and advice.
Make the journey your own
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” The line is usually credited to Oscar Wilde, although there is no evidence he ever said it. Whoever said it first, it is the first thing I would tell anyone thinking about graduate school.
Life is a journey, and the only one worth taking is your own. Jim Simons, the mathematician who founded Renaissance Technologies, made this the first of his guiding principles: “Do something new; don’t run with the pack.” If you go to graduate school because everyone around you is going, or because it seems like the expected next step, you are running with the pack. Go because it is the experience you want to make for yourself.