I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. I agree that working alone seems like the easiest or best choice. However, I think it is a local maxim

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. I agree that working alone seems like the easiest or best choice. However, I think it is a local maximum, and not a true optimal solution. At least for me, working with others makes me way more productive, so I think that my collaborations helped me graduate sooner. I were to start again, I would be more proactive about working with others. Its true that to graduate, you have to write your own thesis, but that doesn't mean you can't collaborate. I've found that parts of work naturally fall to people according to their interests, so it wasn't really a problem for the projects I worked on.