Alternate Plans

[kbupz]

A question for all you CS folks out there who spent some time working in the "real world" before applying: Did any of you end up working somewhere that allowed you to gain useful research experience in some field of computer science? I'm aware there are plenty of jobs out there that can be gotten with a computer science bachelor's degree, but I'm curious if any of them provide good preparation for graduate school. In a nutshell, does there exist a place (outside of academia) where one could better prepare oneself for computer science doctoral study with just a bachelor's degree? (I know a master's degree is the obvious answer, but just humor me)

[aska]

Microsoft used to have something called Research Software Development Engineer, basically a Research Assistant in Microsoft Research. That's definitely research related, and would help you prep for graduate school. Unfortunately they are not hiring anymore thanks to the economy...

Other than that, regular software engineer job to make UI or web application probably won't help.

[belowthree]

There's a bunch of weird funky research institutes out there. There's also staff positions at universities which are sometimes research related. (Being a sysadmin for a research lab for instance may not be the most direct path, but it often provides a door.) There's also a bunch of R&D jobs in industry but unless you're quite good then you're likely to enter those on the other side of grad school instead of before grad school.

[alice]

I worked in an R&D lab (IBM) for a year during undergraduate, on several internal research projects.

Although the work you do there may be **very** interesting, they move much slower in terms of getting published. My impression was that they simply do not care. They wanted, most of all, to have the fancy optimization in their compiler. Then, maybe in a year, apply for the patent. Then God knows when, write the paper.

I still think MS/PhD are better options.

Although I would love to hear about research positions that do not require grad school.

[zaphod_beeblebrox]

I interned at Microsoft Research's India lab (at Bangalore), and that lab actually has a separate position for research work right after a bachelor's degree (or in some cases, master's from an Indian university). It's called a Assistant Researcher (as opposed to post-doc, or full-time Researcher positions), and basically it is a 2-year contract where you actually get to work on research problems that other researchers there work on. I've seen a few people gain a lot of research experience, publish a few papers (~ 2-3 of them) and get really good universities in the US (Berk/MIT/UW...) after two years. It's a new initiative (the lab started off only in 2005), and from what I've heard, it's unique among the MSRs.