>>14288631Idk whenever I hear about people working in the empirical sciences, they always talk about how intense the workload is, and how they literally spend 12 hours/day, 5-6 days/week in the lab.
Math grad school is intense and has a pretty big workload as well, but nothing like that. I spend a few hours each day on campus, but I'm not putting in anywhere near 50-60 hours a week, like I here from physics and biofags. The biggest time sink is that some professors literally assign like 30-50 pages of math text to read per week, which can be a little intense. Most of the actual problem sets and assignments are pretty minimal.
The shit I find the most "miserable" about it l, is that it's my first year, and the first thing they require me to take is a two semester sequence of algebra and a two semester sequence of real analysis. These are literally consider jr/st undergrad classes, and then the first thing you do when you get to get school is spend an entire year studying the same shit that you just learned at the end of your undergrad. I'm here to learn about combinatorics and dynamical systems and other shit, but they make me spend a whole fucking year studying symmetry groups and principal ideal domains. It would at least be a little cooler if it was more unfamiliar material, like if we were doing say group presentations/Burnside type stuff, or if we were studying Lie Groups and matrix groups and other cool applied stuff, but it's not even anything like that. It's basically just undergrad abstract algebra, but you move through the material faster, and spend more time working on complicated Sylow-p subgroup problems and shit, but otherwise, it's thematically the same as undergrad algebra, just more intense.
At least in analysis we learned about sigma algebras and measure spaces and stuff, which was new material, but algebra just seems to be covering old ground.
