On: How bad does it look to drop out of grad school?

[earlyresort]

There's nothing wrong with quitting a Ph.D. program. To me, it looks like you're bright and intellectually curious, but you've got enough sense to ignore sunk costs, which is a valuable skill to have in a startup.

Some places might ask for grad school grades - Google, I'm guessing, they're strange about that sort of thing - but in my experience this is pretty damn rare, especially when the grades are of questionable relevancy. Never happened to me. If it did, I'd just laugh. My grade in Old Church Slavonic simply isn't relevant.

I quit a Ph.D. in History and got my consolation MA when I left. In my experience, most people don't think 'oh, he dropped out of a Ph.D. program' (although I've never hid that), they think 'wow, he got a MA from Stanford!' Not taking the MA would've been silly - now, with some work experience, it doesn't matter, but when starting out it was really valuable.

[principia1 → earlyresort]

"Some places might ask for grad school grades - Google, I'm guessing, they're strange about that sort of thing - but in my experience this is pretty damn rare, especially when the grades are of questionable relevancy. "

It's not so much the possibility of getting low grades that troubles me as the fact that my grades may be EXTREMELY bad (ie, FAILing)

So you think getting an MA as opposed to just dropping out now is very valuable?

[chalst → principia1]

Which school are you enrolled in? The value of the MSc is two-fold:

1. What you learn on it and the quality of the contacts you make, and

2. The prestige and contacts that come with it.

It sounds as if you don't value (1), and (2) is only worth much with an elite university.

[principia1 → chalst]

UT-Austin. I completed my undergrad at UCLA, so their reputations are similar. I'd like to move back home near my family, but Austin is a much better place for startups than LA