| I'm finishing up my PhD this year (haven't set a defense day yet, but I'm aiming for June at this point), and finishing a dissertation requires piles of determination. What I came to realize is that you can't take what they say too seriously especially when you're aspiring to create something out of the ordinary. I can't comment on your personal experience with grad students (I use grad to mean both Masters and PhD students), but I can say that just like people everywhere else, there is a wide variety of interests and abilities. Just like with job applicants, it's easy to see a sample biased by the "bad" ones. The sampling problem is even worse for grad students, the ones lacking in drive, creativity, or intelligence tend to stick around their programs longer [1]. The only other comment that I'll add is, depending on the program, there probably isn't much incentive to work with undergrads in the capacity you are talking about. So the determined/driven/focused grad students will not do it very much. You may have been steered towards projects because it was closer to what they work on, or would explore a question that they had personal interest in. do 4 years as an undergrad, go straight to your Masters in the same school and then to your Doctorate in the same school This is a warning sign. Staying at the same school for undergrad and grad school is called academic inbreeding. If it's a rarity, it's probably a special case that you can ignore (maybe that student was just particularly awesome). If it's common, the program may not be trying hard enough in admissions or perhaps something worse. In my program, there are many students (including me) that did not go straight through undergrad to grad school. tl;dr Just like everywhere else, the awesome people move through grad school quickly and the less awesome people tend to stick around. It's more likely that you were encountering the less awesome people. [1] That's not to say that sticking around a PhD program for more than 5 years is an indication that a person lacks drive, creativity or intelligence. Life happens. Babies, sickness, bad breaks etc.. |