Megan McArdle asks [some of] her readers, which was more formative — undergrad, or grad school?
I thought about how I would answer as I scrolled down, and then I passed one commenter "M. C." who wrote,
Undergrad built me up. Grad school tore me down.
And that's exactly right.
I am grateful for my undergraduate engineering education, almost in a liberal-artsy kind of way: Not because it got me a great, well-paying job (I never attempted to deploy it for this purpose), but because it taught me to think a certain way. To attack life as a problem to be solved, to assess quickly the information I have and don't have, to figure that even if I don't solve the whole shebang, maybe I can make a little bit of progress and at least get partial credit. What's the problem? Well, what do we know about it? What tools do we have? Has someone solved this problem before? How did they do it? What is essential and what is missing? Can we make any assumptions? About how long should this take? How much is it going to cost? Well, if we don't know, what's a reasonable guess for the range it'll fall in?
It's not the only way to be, but it's a way I like being.
I felt so comfortable there, like it was the right place to be.
And I am grateful for the wake-up call that was graduate school, too. The hey-I-don't-really-want-to-be-an-academic part was, shall we say, crucial. That's where I was when I discovered I was in the wrong place. Oddly, it seems, the right place for me was the wrong place, because I had to really be there to figure out that I wasn't supposed to be there. So, that's all right then.
There was high school… there was engineering school… there was grad school. And there is this school. In this school I am the teacher, and I am learning, too. It is a great cliche to say that the students teach the teacher, but it is true, too. (And it is something I learned for the first time in graduate school: you don't know a subject until you have taught it to someone else.)
I feel comfortable here too. It is also the right place to be.
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