I grew up in an environment that valued education over all else, so I pursued post-grad stuff starting 1997 or so and stuck to my guns until way after dot com crashed. Turns out I hated it and ended up wasting a bunch of time and missing out on the exciting stuff, so the advice I would give to my then-self is obviously to not do that. But would I give the same advice to myself if conditions were like today? Thinking maybe not, unless the Amazon thing was thick in the AI infra tech.