As a Creative Writing major, I am considering self-publishing for my first book, but I also want to experience sending it in to a publisher. Since (in the direction it's going in right now) writing will be my profession, I think I want to try sending to 10-12 publishers first and see what kind of results/feedback that will get me.

It seems there are a lot of success stories for self-publishing, however. I think it's mainly about being your own agent and marketing tool, and how you handle that. It's not a bad option.

edit: Be wary of scams, however. I've heard publishing horror stories as well (though I don't know if they'd be considered "self publishing") where people hire agents to publish and market a book for hundreds or thousands of dollars, when it'd be far cheaper to do it yourself. There are also "publishers" that are ridiculed in the writing world, since they accept any book sent to them and are virtually self-publishing. Be wary of those. Further research can shed more light on that, since I only remember a vague story of someone talking to me about it.