How to go to grad school after a couple years working?

[therat]

I've been working in the industry a couple years (3 years), but I'm hoping to go to grad school for a PhD one day. How, in particular, would I get letters of recommendation? A couple of grad school apps I looked at said they wanted at least 2 letters from people in academia, so I'm not sure how I would get these. Do people out of school for a while usually:

1. Get a masters first, and use the professors they meet while getting the masters to write letters of recommendation for the PhD school? (I'm guessing masters places don't require letters from academia? Also, how often are masters programs funded?)

2. Somehow do research with someone somewhere? (If so, how?)

3. If I did somehow find one of my old professors who remembered me enough to write a decent recommendation now, I'm not planning (for family issues) to apply this coming Fall, so is there some way to store the recommendation until later (besides asking the professor to keep it... the main professor I'm thinking of is pretty unorganized, so I doubt he'd be able to keep track of anything he wrote now)?

I've continued to seriously study topics in my areas of interest (my reasons for not going to straight to grad school were family-related), so I'm not worried about being able to return to the student lifestyle, just how I would get recommendations. And I think I would have a had a good chance at top 10 schools if I'd gone straight, based on other people I know who did, though I'm not sure how working in the industry affects my chances now.

[pea-jay]

Option 1 is pretty viable. I got into both my schools with only professional recommendations after 12 or so years. It may be different in your field though.

[grammercie]

Another option is to take a couple courses through a local university or college that pertain to your desired major. Do a bang up job in the classes, interact with the professors, and there you have your references. This is what I did after being out of school for 10 years. Not a single one of my undergrad professors could have remembered me. But the professor who taught the extension class was pleased to help me along toward graduate school in a field we both love.

[grotesqueidols]

You really just need to go with who can provide the strongest commentary on your research abilities. It sounds like any undergrad prof probably isn't the right person for you. My boyfriend was in industry for 10 years before now going back for a PhD. All of his recs were non-academic. In two cases he has been offered more money on top of stipends based on "the strength of his recommendations"...one of these from a school that specifically mentions getting academic recs. Granted the recommenders, while not currently in academia, were well known to the profs who accepted my fella. Also his work has always had a research element to it. Straining to scrape together references in academia really isn't needed provided your industry recs can go on about research and creativity.

[therat]

@grotesqueidols: If you don't mind sharing, where does your boyfriend work? (Or, more broadly, what kind of places in industry let your bf have the kind of job he has [research element, people known in academia]?)

The work I do also has a research element (I do machine learning-type stuff), but at the startups and hedge funds I've been working at, my supervisors definitely aren't known in academia (and probably don't really even understand that well what I've been doing).