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One little piece of advice... for whatever it is worth... and it is free advice, and you get what you pay for... but:

Advanced degrees in IT are not valued very highly without experience behind them. Years in the trenches count. Nobody, but *nobody* will let you jump into a senior level position with just a degree. Even certifications are taken with a grain of salt.

To wit: Nobody in my department has a computer science degree, including me. Of my two senior managers, both of which are top-shelf IT talent, one has a masters in English (from Cornell, of all places), and the other has no college degree at all, but had many years in the Navy.

The rest of the staff are equally displaced from their studies... My best stars have BA's in totally unrelated fields from Greek Classics to Psych to English Lit.

I don't know what specialty you might have in mind, whether it is development or some other angle of IT, but you will likely find yourself working for someone that started coding a *long* time ago, may have no advanced degree at all, and is interested solely in the elegance of your code and not the sheepskin on the wall.

Anyway... my .02, after taxes.

Well, I do have two years' experience already. I'm hoping to stay at least a little employed in grad school, plus grad school itself counts for just a little.

I don't know where I'll specialize for certain right now, but I think I'm more inclined toward design, rather than implementation. AI or HCI work, most likely; a lot of geeks don't seem to understand how 'real' people work. I don't know why real people behave the way they do, but I do know how they behave and what they don't like about computers.

One thing I'm really interested in is expert system development... it relates to what I'm doing now. We'll see. At any rate, with a doctorate I can at least teach!