Yes, I used LaTeX often through undergrad and grad school, and used it for my dissertation. It's probably field-dependent though -- for example, science and engineering fields would probably use LaTeX much more than humanities fields. Learning the basic syntax isn't too hard, I think; kind of like with HTML. For more complicated stuff, you'll probably need to look up how to do things, but for simple stuff, you should be able to learn the basic syntax without too much trouble. As for how awesome it is, that's a matter of opinion. Some things I like about it: it's plain text -- no file format / reader program issues, that makes it easy to send, the file sizes are usually smaller than in say a Word document, and if you're familiar with at least some of the syntax, you should be able to read and understand the file from the source without having to actually process it into a DVI, PS, PDF, or whatever. However, I don't use it much nowadays -- my work uses Word documents most of the time.