My first question to the Hacker News community, I hope I am not doing anything wrong. :)<p>So, the situation is like this: I am 22 years old, I study Computer Science at Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London and I am graduating this July. When I first got admitted to university I was planning to become an academic. Now, all I want is to finish with my exams and...go out there.<p>Now, there are three main problems with that:<p>1. I am most probably going to graduate with a high 2:1 (an average mark between 65% and 70%) from an "average" institution so I suppose that this may be a weak point in my applications for jobs.<p>2. I don't have any major work/project to show to places where I apply. As with my skillset, they are limited to what I was asked to do/study at university. I can obviously work on this issue after I graduate but since then my applications aren't going to be as "rich" as I'd like them to be.<p>3. I don't know if that's the "right" thing to do. I am disappointed with higher education in the UK and this is making me feel that doing a Masters will not really help me (apart from giving me another qualification in papers, that is -yes, I am one of those that believe higher education is overrated-). Also, because of that, I feel tired even when I am just thinking about MSc studies.<p>Which brings me to my question: Do you reckon that it's better I do a Masters (even at a "yet another average university") or should I really give it a go, build something and apply for every position I find interesting? Is "actual work experience" going to be be more helpful than a MSc from a university like, say, UCL or Imperial? What do most people ask for when they look to hire someone? What's better for us as individuals?
My experience has been that my M.S. hasn't particularly helped me to get jobs, but I think that's more because I did my research in a particularly specialized field (vehicular networking) than because the degree is worthless. I worked full-time while going to school, and I think that has done more for my career than the degree did.
I know how things work in far more detail than I did after college, but it feels more like another iteration of breadth-first as opposed to a solid spike of knowledge. About the only thing that my M.S. did for me was killing a latent desire for an academic career. Several conversations with professors who told me, point blank, that they got Ph. D's because they never wanted to get "jobs" gave me sufficient motivation to avoid that track.<p>That said, I enjoyed grad school far more than the time I've spent working, and if I could do it over again I would. The only thing I'd change would be to pick a more widely relevant area for my thesis, which seems to be the only thing anyone really cares about with an M.S..<p>That said, you mention that you already feel like higher education is overrated, and that you don't think you're likely to go to a great grad program. I think this is an open-and-shut case against grad school at this time. I'd head out and make your mark on the world in some other way. You can always revisit grad school if you change your mind, but you won't be able to get your early-to-mid 20's back if you spend them on something you seem to be hesitant about right out of the gate.