YES. I did. In response to your question about the quarter life crisis. The only thing is that mine has been on and off for about 4 years now. It's only been in the past year or less that I've finally started feeling even remotely un-crisis-y. So you are most definitely not alone on that.

I too have been having a similar internal struggle about whether or not I want to commit the next forseeable future to being a student. I'm extremely torn. I see so many of my friends starting what I see as real lives with real jobs and real homes - and here's the kicker - TIME TO ENJOY IT ALL! haha. But it seems so far off for me. But I've starting feeling a little better about it recently... I've come to realize that grad school - especially PhD level grad school - is a completely different animal than undergrad. People actually do have lives while they go to school. So don't think that you can't do both if academia is the route you end up choosing. You can still have the personal life and the academic/professional life. One of the things I have really enjoyed about grad school is the fact that the faculty actually treats us as adults. You're a professional; just a professional student basically. They expect us to have a life outside of school, rather than my college profs who would make us feel like shit for straying from studies for more than a second.

And if you finish it all and decide you actually want to go into a federal job, you definitely won't be out of luck with that. If there is one thing I have come to learn while living around here it is that the feds LOOOOOOVE over educated people. Dan's sister in law finished her PhD in bioengineering last year and couldn't find a job in the private sector, but the fed just scooped her up and she's moving out here this month.

I've been told this whole quarter life crisis thing does in fact settle down, and life does in fact get sorted out eventually. Hopefully it will happen for both of us soon!