Quora Answer: What was your study strategy in grad school?
In graduate school I attended school in England and Australia where there are no classes. You just write your dissertation and everything rests on that passing or failing by external readers. In both cases my study strategy was to learn everything I could and master the subject in order to write my dissertation. In both cases it too quite a few years to do that more the first time than the second. In my opinion mastery is the only way to go. If you are not prepared to do that why bother? But then different people’s definition of mastery are very different from each other. Mine is to go way overboard. But when questions roamed all over the place in my first orals I was glad I did go way beyond what was required because suddenly a deeper level of competence was required than expected. I recommend the English system of education also followed in Australia. To my mind it is a higher standard than for graduate school in the USA. But I guess I am prejudiced because that is the system I am used to from my graduate school days.
See second Ph.D. in Systems Engineering at http://emergentdesign.net