Rupture and continuity

I've been convinced for a while now that there's no actual difference between grad school and undergrad. What I mean is, for the typical PhD student, grad school and undergrad will feel awfully similar. Most current grad students basically created a grad school experience out of their college one, whether by choosing a school based on its grad-like undergrad, or by geeking it up at a school where doing so was unusual. College itself might be different from grad school, but for the person who goes to both, nothing changes. You just go from reading in one library about one aspect of nineteenth-century French-Jewish history to reading in a different library in a different city about a different aspect of the same.

But it looks like others beat me to the punch. And Jacob Levy says it best when he comments, "If you find yourself nostalgic for your Chicago undergrad experience (particularly, say, midterms-through-finals of winter quarter when it feels like your work stretches out forever into both the past and the future) you're probably doomed to grad school."