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This can be good advice if worded a different way: only go to grad school if you really love doing research. If you love research, then the right graduate program is the best place for that. Getting a PhD was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I don’t regret a single day of it.
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I agree, but...

The challenge is how do you really know if you love doing research, committing to graduate school, before really doing research? It is hard to know how the sausage is made without spending/doing time at a meat-processing plant. My undergraduate experience doing research, including be published, was much different than the graduate experience. And graduate experience was much different than the assistant professor experience.

It took me two trips to grad school to get a PhD. The first on their terms, I burned out. The second, on my terms, was a much better/different experience.

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I had the same experience; grad school is the best preparation for grad school. I had wonderful experiences participating in NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduate projects during two of my summers as an undergrad, and I also had a wonderful eight-month internship in a research lab at a major Japanese IT company, but grad school was a different beast, even though I was a grad student at the place I did my NSF REUs. The internships felt like the “demo version” of the real thing.

Come to think of it, I had similar whiplash in industry of full-time jobs being far more stressful than my internships, which I now realize were more-or-less “demo versions.”

To make a long story short, after grad school and working as a researcher in industry for nearly a decade before becoming a professor at a community college (where the emphasis is teaching), I learned that I love doing research as a hobby but not as a career, where there are many pressures.

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I understand your argument for people who pursue research degrees but there are plenty of non-research professional programs that people should be encouraged to pursue if relevant for their goals. E.g. masters in teaching
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Were you the guy in the PL lab that was playing Nightwish?
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