Comment by VladVladikoff
5 months ago
In third year of undergrad it felt like I couldn’t even keep up with the class despite my hard work. Granted this was an engineering program which had an average entrance from highschool marks of 90%, and had 75% of the students drop out by 2nd year because it was so hard.
The capabilities needed for a phd are quite different from regular engineering college though. You can mostly pull through college using cognitive horsepower and hard work directed at obvious and explicitly defined things. Grad school (PhD) is much more about nebulous skills (in addition to hard work and smartness), taste, "reading the room" of the research community, networking, acting according to unwritten and unspoken conventions and "just knowing", branding, self-marketing, confidence etc.