How's your grad school experience - positive, negative, neutral? What do or did you like or enjoy the most, and what do or did you like the least? What do you think graduate education gets wrong today that you would change if you were in charge of grad education tomorrow? What were the top lessons about academia, people, or the world did you learn along the way?
If you're not in grad school but hope to be some day, what do you hope to get from the experience? What are you expectations? What are looking forward to the most? What challenges do you foresee, and how do you hope to handle them?
Edit: Do you think each personality type is different in the experiences or what they are seeking from grad school? Are there are some aspects of graduate education that are easier or harder for various types?
The positives: I had the opportunity to be a full-time student again. I missed that. It had been 10 years since I had finished undergrad. My cohort was a mixed group both culturally and age-wise, which was great. There were people who were as young as early twenties, and as old as late 60's. Our cohort was fairly small, and that meant that getting to know each other was unavoidable. That was good (except when personalities clashed, and there was nowhere to hide).
The negatives: 1) I learned that the evolution of the internet has utterly destroyed my attention span. In undergrad I could churn out multi-page papers in the course of a few hours, sometimes even while stoned. In grad school I could sometimes take 2 hours to complete a single paragraph because I was neurotically looking up useless information online (including browsing INFJs: "DID I GET ANY NEW REPS????") every 30 seconds. 2) My department didn't seem to know what it collectively wanted in its graduates, and it showed. On an individual level, most instructors were great, but none of the classes seemed to tie together with any of the other ones. 3) Unless pursuing a role in academia, the most useful experience in my field comes from year-long field internships which can be important for future job prospects. The two internships I happened to choose unfortunately did not seem prepared to utilize interns, and thus I spent a lot of time
not getting hands-on experience, which was embarrassingly apparent during my first post-grad job interviews.
What it gets wrong: I think that depending upon where you go and what you study, grad education can unfortunately just be a place to buy yourself the right to seek higher paying jobs by going into debt with student loans. I felt that most of the lessons I drew from it were social, derived not from the material, but from dealing with such a wide breadth of people day in, day out, for a couple of years.
I'm sure that each personality type gets different things out of such an experience. I really valued social connections, and fed a lot on having positive interactions with the people around me. As I got to know everyone better, I really came out of my introvert shell towards the end of the program, to the surprise of a lot of people. That probably played a lot into what I drew from the experience.
