Last week one of my students asked my advice about continuing his studies in a CS master program. He told me that he wants to do research, and eventually become a researcher in a university.
From our short time together, I knew that the student was a good coder, and could be relied to work hard whenever I gave him some text to read, or some topic to survey. However, there was something missing. He knew that he wanted to study evolutionary algorithms and artificial intelligence. He liked robots, specially cognition. But when I asked him to list some researchers or recent works that he liked, he couldn't give me any names.
Grad school, and research work in general, is a tough, thankless job. It is not enough to be a good coder, or a good student. It is not enough to have drive. You need something to point that drive at: you need a dream. I have seen too many graduate students who limit themselves to continuing the work of former students, improving a tweak here or there, and calling it a day.
If all you want from the master degree is a little bit of oomph on your curriculum before you jump into industry, well, nothing wrong with that (I can certainly use the extra hands!). However, if you are planning to use grad school as a springboard for academic life, this simply won't do. At some point in your career you will be asked to create novel work.
One way to feed your aspirations is to read what some of the thinking minds of your field have written. Fortunately, for artificial intelligence there is a very large body of work to choose from. Since the student's goal was to create intelligent robots, I told him to start from "The Society of Mind", and Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach".
Yes, these two are old books, and there are things to criticize about them, but they have an important characteristic that I think is missing from many master students that I have contact with: They make you think about the big picture. Not only about the how, but about the why. Not only about the path, but about the goal.
I remember that when I told my PhD advisor that I was reading GEB, he told me to "be careful, that book makes people a bit crazy in the head". To be honest, I think we do need grad student who are a bit crazy in their heads.