Is taking a long break before starting graduate school a potential disadvantage?

[anonymity]

I made a post a day or two ago, but got no responses. This post is a simplification.

How long is too long to take off in between undergraduate study and graduate study?

I want to join the navy as a nuclear trained officer, but this would entail a 5-6 year obligation. Could this amount of time away from academia be a potential problem for a graduate student?

 

[Geezer]

I made a post a day or two ago, but got no responses. This post is a simplification.

How long is too long to take off in between undergraduate study and graduate study?

I want to join the navy as a nuclear trained officer, but this would entail a 5-6 year obligation. Could this amount of time away from academia be a potential problem for a graduate student?

I graduated with my bachelor's degree in 2006; I will be starting grad school in physics this fall (2011).

 

[anonymity]

what have you been doing since 2006?

 

[Geezer]

what have you been doing since 2006?

Marriage, kid, follow my better half around the country, post-doc to post-doc until we finally settled someplace semi-permanently. And I worked, too, as an accountant.

 

[anonymity]

Woo. Things may not be so bleak after all.

There's no way that you remember everything you learned, though...you know? Aren't you at all concerned about this?

Jumping right into some advanced analysis or combinatorics (or, if you're not going to be studying math, something equally specialized) after doing nothing but basic accounting mathematics for six years just doesn't seem practical to me, or is this something I shouldn't be concerned about?

My time in the navy will be largely non-technical. I will be in a class-room setting learning all of the basic nuclear propulsion theory for 18 months or so, but the rest of my time will be as a line-officer on a sub, not as an engineer, in the technical sense, but as an officer overseeing the sub and the sub's reactors and the crew.

(Congrats, too, old man Geezer -- five years late, but hey, what can you do? lol).

Anyone else?