>>12044930Well, grad school is for most a means to get paid to do math and to meet others who do math. Supposing you have no grand visions of prestige and that you do not want to teach, you can try getting creative about the way you make money and the way you make friends. If you can find a good position that balances income and time, you can learn a lot of math. If you can find friends to talk about math with, you can learn a lot of math.
It's not clear to me why so many insist on going to grad school. It sounds hard, gruelling, and competitive, yet in many ways it is the path of least resistance. The total refusal of many would-be mathematicians to try and forge different paths has always been very frustrating to me. I am guilty of this myself. My current position pays jesrly double what a typical professor of mathematics would make, so you'd think I would figure out how to turn this into a position that pays the same as a professorship with half the time, leaving me free to learn math at a much quicker pace. Yet every day I fail to do this.
Of course, this js all just silly cope. I hope that you just get into grad school. But supposing you do not, maybe you will take this as a challenge to succeed where I have failed.
