
Y Combinator vs. Graduate School - vibhavs
http://startupboy.com/2010/02/08/y-combinator-vs-graduate-school/
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jrockway
After your YC startup fails, you have 2 less years of your life and "failed
startup" on your resume. After graduate school, you have letters after your
name that makes it easier to get jobs.

Just sayin', this article is very fanboish. Startups are for people that want
to do startups, not for people that want to "do something" after college. In
many cases, starting a startup can be a bad decisions. (And in some, like
Google, it can be pretty good.)

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skennedy
A failed startup is not necessarily a bad thing. Depends on a lot of factors
like how far it got, what funding was used, and challenges that were overcome.

A person who has business, financing, customer, technical, and product
management exposure is likely a very promising asset to a company.

How often do you find those qualities in a graduate student where academia
itself gives you little real world experience? Need some good internships to
back up that degree.

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_delirium
If you're "repeating the works of the greats" in grad school, you're doing it
wrong. That's what undergrad is for, and maybe a masters, but getting a PhD is
supposed to be all about producing something new. By the end you should be
_the_ world expert in your (admittedly narrow) area, and have produced
published scientific results that were previously not known to the field.

Overall though, they're two totally different things, and if you don't know
which of the two is more appealing to you, you don't have a very good idea of
what you want to do. Do you want to advance the current state of scientific
knowledge? Or do you want to produce products and services that people will
find useful? The two occasionally overlap, but in general they're fairly
different occupations.

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pbiggar
If you're paying to go to grad school, you're doing it wrong.

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jfornear
Can you expand on this idea? Law school can be expensive but worth the cost,
for counterexample.

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pbiggar
I'm talking specifically about CS, as CS students would be the main group of
people who can choose between grad school and YC. The point is probably valid
for all science courses.

Good students get paid to do PhDs in science. That's not generally true for
grad school in arts and humanities, but those students would rarely be looking
to apply to YC/techstars, etc.

~~~
gcheong
Perhaps he was thinking more of MS programs for which I think most people pay.

~~~
pbiggar
Maybe. I wouldn't use the term 'grad school' for an MSc program, unless its
the first two years of a US PhD.

I think the OP is talking about PhD programs too. After all, doing a short MSc
doesn't prevent you doing YC afterwards.

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donaq
Far be it from me to suggest that YC is not good for people, but...

 _After school, you get a job. After YC, you create jobs._

Not necessarily.

 _You repeat the works of the greats in school. YC expects you to do original
work._

There is value in standing upon the shoulders of giants.

 _"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George
Santayana_

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patio11
Two years of industry experience can be a wonderful thing, too. Ideally your
job will teach you all the bits of professionalism that your schooling left
out (a short list from mine: SQL, SVN, and how to obsessively document
_everything_ ), and you'll probably get good exposure to an industry. If you
want ideas of things which need fixing, work for a living; you'll end up with
more than you could ever use.

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ivankirigin

       “Y Combinator” is a generic term

Well that is interesting. Why shouldn't YC be a xerox or kleenex brand? PG
seems consistently annoyed with naming and labels applied to YC, but I don't
think he'd mind a generalization of the name.

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skennedy
Agreed contingent on two points of concern:

1\. Did you gain enough practical/technical knowledge before or during
undergrad to attack a given problem with a profitable solution?

2\. Can you convince an investor of point #1?

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fretlessjazz
Most people don't go to grad school to start companies.

