> All of which is to say that the work load of graduate school is not like an extension of the undergraduate experience, but a quantitative change massive enough to be a qualitative change; the work-load is massively heavier.
It's a massive change IFF you didn't spend part of your undergraduate experience gaining genre literacy in the given field.
E.g., compare a grad experience of:
1. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven.
2. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of articles about Native Americans from the Journal of Ethnomusicology since its inception in the 50s.
Your subjective experience of either of these depends on your own history with the topic. If you've site read most or all of the Beethoven sonatas, it probably feels like a gift to be getting paid a stipend to document your own formal analyses of them (or whatever we define "annotate" to mean in this context). If you spent your childhood reading everything you could get your hands on in the local library on tribal politics, annotating those Ethno articles is going to be a breeze.
Btw-- #1 is probably much more difficult and time consuming than #2-- it's over ten hours of music if you listened to it continuously. I write it there because I've done both #1 and #2, and #2 felt like so much more work because a) I didn't have genre literacy in ethnomusicology and b) even though it was a valuable experience, at the time I would have rather been analyzing Beethoven sonatas.
It's a massive change IFF you didn't spend part of your undergraduate experience gaining genre literacy in the given field.
E.g., compare a grad experience of:
1. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven.
2. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of articles about Native Americans from the Journal of Ethnomusicology since its inception in the 50s.
Your subjective experience of either of these depends on your own history with the topic. If you've site read most or all of the Beethoven sonatas, it probably feels like a gift to be getting paid a stipend to document your own formal analyses of them (or whatever we define "annotate" to mean in this context). If you spent your childhood reading everything you could get your hands on in the local library on tribal politics, annotating those Ethno articles is going to be a breeze.
Btw-- #1 is probably much more difficult and time consuming than #2-- it's over ten hours of music if you listened to it continuously. I write it there because I've done both #1 and #2, and #2 felt like so much more work because a) I didn't have genre literacy in ethnomusicology and b) even though it was a valuable experience, at the time I would have rather been analyzing Beethoven sonatas.