From talking with professors and people who went to grad school (mostly PhDs, I think), my impression has been that in grad school / while pursuing their PhDs, beyond acquiring more knowledge about their field, they learned/developed an interesting sense of thinking about problems and a mindset or orientation towards addressing them that I haven't quite found among people that haven't gone through the grad school / PhD process.
For those of you that have had that experience or perceived it in others, please let me know and give me a description of it.
I've heard things about grad school that suggest to me that I might not want to go through the experience (highly political and stressful), but I'm quite interested in developing/acquiring for myself what I have perceived in others who have gone through it.
@bthall The thing about grad school is that the process that for me helped me learn how to think more critically was
1. Reading complex texts everyday
2. Writing weekly analyses and arguments based on those texts
3. Getting those analyses ripped to shreds, and being pushed to think and go deeper
4. Having my hubris destroyed (thank God)
Grad school is just doing those things all the time hyper-intensively and in a guided fashion BUT grad school isn't the only way to do those things.
Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well. You get so much reading thrown at you, you have to learn very quickly how to delegate or exchange tasks with others in your cohort, and you quickly learn how to read for what's important (and ignore the fluff).
Grad school can also be useful for developing a set of approaches for dealing with a new problem or puzzle, and for developing the toolkit for addressing that problem/puzzle.
@bthall grad school was interesting but I've learned more from reading books outside the academy. In fact, I've learned more by following the right ppl on social media than I ever could have in my classes.