<p>are we underestimating the difficulty of basketweaving? i don’t think its as easy as youd think. you have to weave pretty consistently with focus for a quality product</p>
<p>^ if you’re adventurous, you’ll do it underwater too</p>
<p>All I know is that MBA=easiest and medical, law, and engineering=hard…probably medical is hardest imo</p>
<p>Medical school, hands down. Preparing for admissions as a pre-med is a very tedious process, and the USMLE (multiple-choice exams that last several hours and come in 3 steps that are to be taken throughout med school and in residency + simulated patient interactions) looks to be no joke either. 4 years of all that tacked onto the dense course work along with 3-7 years of residency afterward? If that’s not difficult, then I don’t know what is.</p>
<p>Dental school… duh :D</p>
<p>Medical school. What you learn there can save lives- and if you screw up people die. That kind of pressure makes it the most difficult to me.</p>
<p>a pHD is definitely harder than law, and I would definitely respect someone with a pHD more than someone with a JD right off the bat.</p>
<p>Med school might be a more equal contender, but I think they are ultimately different challenges.</p>
<p>Thing is some medical, PhD, MBA, or law student might say that their respective graduate school is the hardest. Some people might find their grad school easy while some might not.</p>
<p>From what I have been told about PhD (in chemistry) programs from my TAs, I know that research takes up practically all of their time. I remember one of my organic TAs told me that he would come in at 7am and wouldn’t leave the lab till 10pm. I don’t know anything about other PhD programs (like psych, econ, or math) though. It seems like for organic chemistry PhD, there’s two parts to it. First one is the original thesis and the second part is the lab work…which is the tedious part since not every reaction will work the way you think it would.</p>
<p>I remember one of my physical chem TAs told us once that unlike a recent JD and MD graduate, a PhD graduate can start working in the field right away due to the research experience. I am not sure if this applies to other PhD disciplines though.</p>
<p>Medical I heard from everyone is very easy once you get in as long a you have a goof study ethnic.
Business haha that is easy, it is simply an indicator for companies.
I think the most difficult for most people are the highly quantitative Ph.D fields.</p>
<p>this whole thread is [ridiculous]… you have a bunch of young people who haven’t even gone thorough the process of grad school sit here and write what they have heard from prob a max of 10 people. how can you even credibly compare something unless you go to both e.g. med school and law school and then make a comparison.</p>
<p>Hahah I was just going to call this thread out, but good job mac</p>
<p>med and law school aren’t grad school but they are both notoriously time consuming.</p>
<p>for actual grad school, I don’t know. depends on the specific project. i’ve worked with people doing both engineering and biology masters/phd’s and the engineering work seemed harder. I know a guy doing a masters in sociology and it’s a joke. </p>
<p>If I had to guess I’d say that applied math or something could be hard at the masters level.</p>
<p>Interesting perspective of law school…</p>
As someone in med school… yeah, it’s easily the worst. It’s not about hard or difficult. If you’re smart, even the most complex science is easy to understand. Before I go on, I just finished a 4 class cumulative final, hence a little time.
Medical school is the hardest, not because the material is way harder, although it is, it’s the hardest because of the pure quantity of information. You’re taking 6-8 classes at a time, we’ll call it 7 for the math, of which each lectures about 5 hours a week each. so 35 hours of class time, you go through about 130 slides per lecture, very dense slides. For me each lecture takes about 2.5 hours to learn outside of class. For most people it’s more. So do the math on that. 2.5*35+35=122.5 hours/week out of 168 hours a week spent studying to keep up with your schedule. Gives you about 6 and a half hours a day for sleep, eating, socializing, or whatever you want to do.
Essentially every decisions that you make in medical school cuts directly into the minimum amount of sleep you need to get in order to not completely burn out. And you have to exercise for 30 minutes a day, or you burn out. Admittedly, I’m a gunner at a very good school, I could get by doing much less, but it’ll just make my life way worse later trying to get through residency.
If you want one telling statistic that proves med school is the worst… medical students/residents are more likely to commit suicide than any other group of people… including … wait for it… people with suicidal bi-polar depression.
Don’t forget, the med students get the privilege of 120 work weeks once we’re out of medical school and in our residencies. Why do we do it? Because we’re clearly not as smart as MBA students.
Putting aside “tier” discussion, you can go to law school, business school PT at night and work FT during day. You won’t be able to do that with med school.
The relative difficulty is irrelevant - if you have your heart set on pursuing neurosurgery, you aren’t going to switch over to law school just because law school is “easier” than medical school. I’ve noticed that College Confidential has an obsession with suffering; like the most noble of men are those who took the most challenging courses at the most rigorous institutions in all the land. People act like there is a positive correlation between your moral fiber and your number of sleepless nights.
Someone in this thread said that they’d respect a PhD over a JD right off the bat – what kind of elitist nonsense is that? Respect everyone until they give you a reason not to; your local McDonald’s cashier probably doesn’t have an engineering degree but that doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly human garbage because they didn’t grind their way through MIT the same way your neighbor’s uncle’s best friend did.
/rant
Exactly what @preamble1776 said. I also agree with mac on the second page…this thread is really about a bunch of people who have been to no grad programs trying to opine how difficult they are on the basis of what “somebody” told them or that they “heard” somewhere. That’s not really useful, or accurate. Like this:
I had to chuckle when I saw this because it’s such a gross and lazy misinterpretation of what a PhD is about. Yes, PhD students do only take 2-3 courses a semester (well, most of them - I took 3-4 courses a semester in my program), but 1) the courses are much harder and more time-intensive than undergraduate courses, which is why you take so few and 2) your coursework is the least important and time-intensive part of a PhD program. Seriously. My first semester our director of graduate studies told us not to even worry about our grades, because they were irrelevant. Finishing a PhD program in less than 4 years is nigh impossible; less than 5 years is quite difficult.
But the rest of the characterizations aren’t necessarily true, either. I have friends at/who went to top business schools and they aren’t “rusty” - being several years out of college doesn’t make you unintelligent. In fact, they were usually high achievers from great colleges who ALSO had business acumen and had ascended to leadership posts in their fields in just the 2-5 years since they’d left college. I have friends who are at or went to top law schools, too, and it’s definitely not “passive” learning and “just” taking classes. The workload is enormous, the professors needle you (ever head of the Socratic method?), and the competition is fierce to be near the top of the class so that you can get a good job upon graduation. And I have friends who are in or went to medical school, and that’s difficult too. Memorization of loads of information, somewhat competitive nature, lots of studying and little free time.
Graduate school is difficult, period! It’s not supposed to be easy, and which one is “hardest” is really a matter of personal preference and abilities. I would’ve found medical school incredibly difficult because I am completely uninterested in biological science and am bad at memorizing things; but someone who struggled with writing and didn’t like coming up with independent research ideas might find academic graduate school way harder than med school.
I also agree with preamble in that people deserve respect because they are people, not because of the credentials they have. A McDonald’s cashier trying to support her family on that salary is pounding it out at least as hard as I did during my doctoral degree - only I didn’t have to worry about getting evicted, my kids going hungry or losing my job because I got a cold and need to call out. And they’re getting paid a lot less to deal with that kind of stress.
Also, please don’t try to spell around the language filter - it exists for a reason! 
In the end, they’re all just so DIFFERENT. Like someone else pointed out, medical school and law school are really more like trade schools where you learn a specific set of skills. PhD programs are all about research and providing your own, unique look into something.
PhD programs require more than just passively learning things and showing you can remember them. All my professors go on and on about how hard writing the thesis was and how they spent YEARS of their life working on it.
Yes, it it takes like 6-8 years to get a PhD, but you also need an MA before that, which takes around 2. So some people can spend 10 years of their lives beyond undergrad studying and learning to become an expert at something. There aren’t many people out there who are willing/can handle devoting an entire decade like that. It takes determination, perseverance, and drive, and I WOULD respect someone with a PhD automatically because I know they’ve put so much work into it. However, I wouldn’t necessarily respect them more than someone with a law degree because they’re two completely different degrees.
To me, this is kind of like asking which foreign language is the hardest to learn. Some are easier for some people (example, Spanish speaker learning French) and others are more difficult (English speaker learning Chinese). It all depends on where you’re coming from and what skills/interests you already possess.