I'm not sure. I'm trying to work towards a career path which uses as much of my ability as I can. The most important job for a professional programmer, was understanding what your client wanted. This is a fine job, but being good at algorithms isn't necessarily a requirement.

When talking to an engineer at Google, I asked what he thought a good career choice was for working on hard problems. His immediate first thought was graduate school, then he sort of mentioned robotics.

My ideal dream isn't being a professor, it's working on something that needs inference, that uses my mathematical abilities. So I'm leaning towards research, but that's the implication not necessarily the goal.

Teaching isn't the goal, hands on altruism isn't the goal. Fitting into a place where I'm using as much of my skill set as possible, is the goal.

And that is a terminal goal, I can do boring stuff in the mean time. My point for jumping out of programming, was exactly that the math wasn't the important part, it was the picture. The math is important to someone else. I'd like to be that someone else.

I try to explain this to people though, and almost all of them think I'm being way to vague (or they don't understand). You go to school because that's the only way you're going to study the distribution of zeroes for the Wronskian of orthogonal polynomials. I've had maybe one professor discourage me from being too picky...