Raw LLM Responses

I think earning a bachelor's degree is still relevant. However, you need to choose your specialty more carefully than ever. If possible, I'd also advise doing an internship each summer instead of taking more classes to graduate faster or doing a random job, doing the latter won't give you any professional experience. Even if you're a successful student who loves challenges, stay away from continuing on with a master's or doctorate! You'll just be digging yourself into a deeper hole. There aren't enough adequate jobs out there for all the PhDs running around, certainly not in academia. Fifteen years ago, I earned a PhD in physics from a reputable university with excellent grades but I didn't publish sufficiently. My advisor went through a divorce and stopped caring about publishing extensively. He already had tenure. The more senior graduates, myself included, ran the lab. After I graduated, the lab shut down cause he had mismanaged research funds. I was his last PhD student: only #10 in a career spanning close to 40 years. Normally, a professor will easily have more than twice that number of PhD graduates. It didn't help that the only place I could work in my field was if I landed a job at a national lab (17 in total). I struggled to get an offer and when I finally got one, I recognized the guy was a lunatic (from experience) so I turned it down. During the interview, the guy kept talking about the postdoc he had just fired and nobody else was working for him. I switched to software engineering where I've had a rewarding career. AI isn't going to replace me cause my work requires advanced math and critical thinking. You need to choose wisely. Don't give up.