cahn

I would say that grad school took me from the knowledge that I was one of the best of the math students in my year, to knowing that I was a mediocre mathematician. So although I came out of it with better skills in math, I had a worse self-confidence in that area. This is probably a common experience, and not strange, because as a student you're working with small, self-contained problems. By contrast, as a grad student you're working with large, open-ended problems that take years to solve.

YES. ALL OF THIS. luzula has much more succinctly phrased what my graduate experience (and the experience of most people I know in physics and mathematics, in fact) was like. You are right that it's not strange! Though I can see why it is different for people not in the hard sciences.

(Though, mildred_of_midgard, I am starting to see though why we have some different opinions on high school math pedagogy. For me, I would have liked my math education sometime before grad school to have taught me at least the basics of sitting with larger problems without knowing the answer -- maybe not the kind one works on as a grad student, but at least I think I would have benefited from more experience with throwing myself against problems without knowing how to solve them, and making incremental progress over at least days, if not weeks or months as it can be in grad school. But I suppose if one isn't going to grad school in math or physics, maybe it's not so important to have those kinds of experiences.)