Counterpoint example, I've yet to do grad school but I did take some graduate level classes as technical electives my senior year. While they were the most interesting in the abstract, the professors that taught them also seemed to assume that interest alone will drive you and you therefore need less structure. I found this lack of structure extremely annoying and difficult to mange, expectations were always vague. What's the point of the professor if I have to define everything myself? I ended up saving everything to the last minute as my more structured undergrad classes demanded more immediate milestones, which just produced a ton of stress and some shock when I ended up with a B in Compiler Design when I was hoping to just barely scrape by with a C- or something, given the relative lack of time and effort I'd put into it.

Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.

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tombert 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

To each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.

Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.

I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.

	▲	scottLobster 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job. Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)