Education

[murdlih]

So I was reading this book, you might have heard of it, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig, and there is a passage in which he talks about learning and universities and such. I want to share part of it with you. I was going to try and summarize it, but found that I couldn't really do it, so there is like two pages

Comments

[anemone]

Graduate school works a lot like the gradeless system. Grades are pretty informal and not important. No one is there to make you do anything. No one even tells you what to do. It's liberating, but it's also terrifying. That's what makes grad school so hard.

People with PhDs end up strange because of this. They've spent this time where there was essentially no external motivation to do anything--no carrot, no stick--and so they just can't be told what to do in quite the same way.