Even at the same school, one person reported to me that while he was in his second year his supervisor told him he probably had enough material to pass if he wrote it all up - while another person worked long hours and reported to me that his supervisor had shouted at him for not coming in to monitor his experiments on christmas day. One person went on to a research position in the private sector and feel it set them up for a good career; another hoped to enter humanities academia, but wasn't able to find any jobs and ended up doing office admin work that barely needed an undergraduate degree.
Even for the same student, some parts of the process will be enjoyable and fascinating, other parts will be frustrating and tiresome. If you had asked me two years in I'd have told you doing a PhD is pretty great - by the end, having gone through the process of writing up, my opinion pretty inverted. I decided a career in academia wouldn't suit me at all.
If you boil the experience of doing a PhD down to the essentials of the experience, there's very little left because the experience varies so much.
I didn't opt for a phd but I sometimes wish I did. I answered C to every one of these questions.
There's also, I believe, a CMU computer science "guide to graduate school survival" out there.
I don't think that this (somewhat self-deprecating) graduate school literature is unrealistically negative. Academia is pretty awful.
Life-wise, graduate school is a pretty negative experience. If you enjoy the subject matter and have an almost obsessive need to dive into it, it's a great time in that regard (and you will be spending 60+ hours per week on your work) because you can really study without having to deal with the bullshit that professors have to fend off (committees, tenure politics, grant-writing). The rest of your life will be somewhere from mediocre (if you don't care about the academic game, already dead-set on leaving post-PhD) to awful (if you try to play for keeps); even successful and happy graduate students experience this.
The upshot of graduate school is that, except for the money and low status-- and those aren't issues for everyone-- it's actually better than being a professor. You don't have to serve on committees or sweat tenure decisions or disciplinary hearings for cheating undergraduates, and you have a 5- to 7-year period where geographic moves under adverse circumstances won't happen.
I don't think grad school is like that for everyone. My undergrad had such a huge workload that I rarely had time for any kind of fun. Grad school so far is like the college that I didn't have, except I also get to work on research that's really exciting to me. I'm also kind of young for a grad student so I can hang out with undergrads just fine. It's a win-win.
Also, you're a douche for bringing up irrelevancies like that.
Also I'm pretty sure I've seen you say that you're proud of the fact that your perspective on life isn't typical -- so at least own that fact here.
FWIW, much as I get annoyed by Michael's constant negative comments about Google (experiences which are fairly foreign to my own experience there), they are still his experiences. Take them with a grain of salt, but take everyone's experiences from the Internet with a grain of salt.
Also FWIW, I have a number of friends who are generally shiny happy people who were basically ground down into dust in their Ph.D programs. They stayed for the whole time and not just the first year, but around year 4-6 even the most mentally stable and cheerful of them start saying things like "My life is miserable. I just want this to be over."
You also seem to have read a personal opinion into my post that simply isn't there!
Structure of this thread:
MOC: I spent a year in graduate school. Life-wise, graduate school is a pretty negative experience.
Shardling: Probably worth pointing out that MOC has an extremely negative view of many of their life experiences.
That's exactly the form of an ad-hominem argument: Person A makes a statement, person B brings up some fact about person A that would lead them to make that statement, ergo person A's statement is invalid. The problem here is logical, not personal: just because MOC has made negative statements about other things does not mean this negative statement is without basis.
I read no such personal opinion into your post: I'm attacking your logic, not your tone.
http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
In contrast, when someone offers an anecdote about their experiences, or in general offers their subjective judgement, then knowing something about them is damn important! For instance, if I knew MOC was a compulsive liar, that would certainly be relevant. Likewise, if MOC was in general an optimist who was loath to ever say anything negative, that would lend extra weight to their comments on grad school.