Difficulty of grad school as compared to undergrad

I just posted the following on a message board in respone to someone’s question about the difficulty of grad school as compared to undergrad years. As much as I’ve written on this blog, this may seem old, but some readers may find it informative:

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Interesting question…I’d say that the difficulty of a grad program depends on a lot of factors, including your prior educational and professional experience, the quality and backgrounds of your classmates, whether you’re working or not, and how well you actually want to do academically. My undergrad was in a subject that I had no prior experience in, so I found it to be four years of torture trying to learn everything and get through it and, in general, I found grad school to be much easier than my undergrad years. I did 3 grad programs and had a wide range of experiences:

– MS in Mgmt of IT: My undergrad was in Computer Science and I had worked for a few years as a Software Engineer before doing this program, so I thought I’d cruise through the program. I didn’t find the material to be too challenging given that background, but my problem was that my classmates had a ton more experience than I did and would blow me out of the water in class discussions (the avg age of folks in the program was 35 and I was only 24 when i started). Due to my lack of real world experience, I often had to work harder to make sure that I read every line of the class readings and could rely on those in class…I was working full-time back then, which made this even more difficult. Also, because my classmates were older and well established in their career, they didn’t care about their grades, but I was using this program as a springboard to get into a good MBA program, so that was a big problem for me. On group assignments, I always worried about working my butt off to make sure my groups did well because I wanted to prove that i could perform well at the graduate level to set myself up for business school applications.

– MBA: Many people might tell you that the hardest thing about an MBA program is getting into the program, but I’d argue that that depends on your background prior to B-school. Don’t get me wrong, taking the GMAT and doing all those applications is a beast, but the difficulty of that paled in comparison to what I saw when I got into the classroom. When i started, I had no business experience, so I had to learn everything from scratch…everytime I saw something in one of the Core classes, it was literally the first time I’d ever heard of it. On the other hand, many of my classmates came from investment banking, consulting, or financial services backgrounds and had seen many of the concepts before, so they would just kill it in the classroom and then party afterward, while I would be stuck in my room reading late into the night. Starting out so far behind your classmates can have an affect on your confidence, which can also affect your academic performance (or your perception of it). Once you get through the Core classes and move into electives, you’ll probably find that the classes get easier because you’ll be taking subjects that you find interesting and everyone else will have just as little experience in the topic as you do. Dang, I could talk all day about the MBA experience, so, if you’d like more info, hit me up.

– MA in Education: This one was the easiest of the three because I was doing it purely for interest’s sake and the classes weren’t too difficult. Also, I wasn’t planning on making a career in education, so I wasn’t really sweating my grades. In my Education classes, it usually all came down to how well you did on the final papers. Whether I participated in class and did all the readings or not, I found that my final class grade hinged on whether I brought the thunder on the final assignment.