>>10842724for years 1-2 you must focus on classes. they will be very difficult classes that you need to stay up very late every night for in order to get decent homework grades. (if you cheat, though, maybe you can slip by without this torture, but typically that requires having a cheater-group of friends that typically only foreign students can find. local students are typically less prone to forming cheating cliques)
once you start 3rd year, the expectation is that you join a research group. this means meeting with a few professors and finding out research opportunities. once you join their group you are expected to do research most of the time, which means producing results (lab or theoretical or otherwise) on a consistent basis, with accompanying deadlines. this means you will probably have less of a regular burden of staying up late every night to finish homework, but on the other hand you have tasks to do which may require an unexpected amount of time. so you may have all-nighters every few weeks to meet your deadlines thanks to unexpected research issues
>years 4-7:here you are meant to keep doing research until you have something to write your thesis on. this is when you are most likely to be fired by your supervisor because you aren't getting shit done (which is typically due to laziness but sometimes due to the fact the research is just too damn hard or impossible despite your advisor thinking it should be possible). at this point you need to be self-motivated and see to your own checkpoints in your progress, which is surprisingly hard to adjust to. but there will still be all-nighters for certain things you need to "deliver". once your research is done, you need to motivate yourself to write a 100-250 page write-up of everything you've done. this usually comes with the challenge to overcome a huge amount of dread and procrastination that makes you feel like you already did the research, so "why should i have to write a super long paper"?
