context: I'm 1 month away from my masters.

Straight out of university, I recommend going out and landing that job. Get some work experience for at least a few years, have some fun, and see what you like in the Real World version of the field.

With luck, you'll run into something that's a problem for your employer, and potentially a thesis topic worth pursuing professionally.

With more luck, you'll be in an environment that lets you work on your masters part time (3yrs in my case) while collecting a full time paycheck. Very handy that paycheck - I could not have done this on much less than full pay.

With more more more luck, your employer might even pay tuition for you.

With more more more more more more more luck, you'll actually enjoy both your work and your area of focus.

I've been lucky.

Note: part time study & full time work cuts down on fun big time, and makes friends nag you for not attending all social events. Avoid losing friends and your sanity by taking time out, even if it means cramming a few days later.

Canada: 30 Million people, has a Space Agency and "une agence spatiale".
Australia: 21 Million people, no Space Agency

Crikey, a project like the Canadarm would be cool, eh?

The creator of Rails has expressed regret for that video, because it gives people the impression that CRUD generation is the most important feature of RoR. 99% of the J2EE work I've seen doesn't require high-performance, low latency distributed messaging engines. That's the edge case that Rails doesn't and can't handle right now. If JRuby ever progresses, it will get that. (I wonder if we could bolt a messenger framework to a Rails app, open sockets maybe?) Speaking of edge cases, Hibernate still kicks ActiveRecord's ass. For those of us who live in that 99% of projects that don't require those edge cases (or can drop down to SQL when AR doesn't hold up), there's a lot of productivity and elegance to the Rails community's projects. Have you seen Migrations? Things like that are a delight to code with. In the same vein, check out the config for URL mapping if you've ever been frustrated by web.xml. Tag libs and filters, features I appreciated when going from PHP to Java in 2001 are more straightforward in Rails. In the Java world I was already convinced that Hibernate/Spring was the way to go, and wanted to avoid EJB's as much as I could. I've worked with them, and they're f&*()g messy, barely testable, slow abominations. In Rails, I've got all the features I wanted to deal with in J2EE... so far, no regrets. But speaking of edge cases and awesomeness... have you played at all with Ruby (not Rails)? There's been a few times I've done thing in Ruby I simply couldn't have in Java, thinking "Fuck, I always wondered why it was so complicated".