It's not what you asked for, but if you haven't read the likes of it before, you should. I wish I could have read it when I was your age. I wonder if I would have believed it.
If you still need advice on graduate admissions, I can tell you that pg and cperciva are on the right track. Undergrad research is particularly great, as it gives you lots of contact with an adviser who will write great recommendation letters for you.
I have a science Ph.D. I have reviewed manuscripts for journals. It is by now almost physically impossible for me to claim that any piece of prose is "totally true". :)
Greenspun says a lot of things I don't agree with. I'm not prepared to endorse everything he says about women in science, for example... but, then, this essay isn't really about that, is it? And he exaggerates a bit for effect, but I believe that the effect is justified.
Yeah, it's essentially true. As Greenspun says: some people love science so much that they can ignore these problems, cheerfully, throughout their entire career. I have quite a few friends like that. I tried to be one of them, and sometimes I wish it had worked. But not very often. Your stomach knows when you are lying to yourself.
Here's what I wrote about grad school back in 1998, when I was still there:
Not that everything about grad school is bad. You can work any 70 hours per week that you want. If you just want to waste time and never graduate, and you find the right adviser, you don't even have to work at all. And the people you meet are generally smart, unusual, and fun. But for me grad school is fun just like playing Tetris all night is fun. In the morning you realize that it was sort of enjoyable, but it didn't get you anywhere and it left you very very tired.
I think it's a bit exaggerated. Certainly the _average_ assistant professor isn't denied tenure: that only happens in about 10-20% of cases as I understand it.
I'd agree that it's a little bit exaggerated. And yet... I'd claim that the real reason why "only" 20% of assistant profs are denied tenure is that the system now weeds them out at the postdoc level. It's now considered normal to require candidates to perform multiple postdocs before awarding them a tenure-track position. The only sure way to escape that treadmill is to write your own grant and get it funded... which, by no coincidence at all, is also the secret to being a successful assistant prof.
You can count the number of first-year grad students per year. You can count the number of graduating Ph.D.s per year. And you can count the number of tenure-track openings per year. And then you know the percentage of people who will eventually leave, or be kicked out, of academia. The rest is detail.
Most of us leave. For a motivated student to be forced out is kind of rare. They're quite happy to have you. You're really, really cheap.
Problem is, leaving after a couple of years of a PhD program is the academic equivalent of chewing your own leg off, and most people won't do it -- even if it's the right decision.
You have to be exceptionally mentally strong to leave that culture without grabbing the brass ring, and even then, it can haunt you with feelings of failure and inadequacy for years (people like Jerry, Larry and Sergey are the obvious exceptions.)
It's not what you asked for, but if you haven't read the likes of it before, you should. I wish I could have read it when I was your age. I wonder if I would have believed it.
If you still need advice on graduate admissions, I can tell you that pg and cperciva are on the right track. Undergrad research is particularly great, as it gives you lots of contact with an adviser who will write great recommendation letters for you.