Yeah, it's one thing for a kid unfamiliar with rigorous academic culture to be shell shocked during undergraduate school. I certainly was, and it was a long slo

Yeah, it's one thing for a kid unfamiliar with rigorous academic culture to be shell shocked during undergraduate school. I certainly was, and it was a long slog for me with plenty of scars and a below average academic record to show for it. (And as not a member of a favored minority group, the system was much more merciless--you don't get the benefit of white privilege at those elite levels unless you can at least walk and talk the part, and from those heights there's nary a difference between poor black or latino kids and poor white kids in terms of how they come across, and plenty of minority students who could play the part much better than I ever could.) But by the time you hit graduate school the rules of the game are clear; even if you're still not proficient in understanding how you're supposed to approach and regurgitate the material, the expectations should be abundantly clear, as well as the dilemmas academia faces which motivate those rules. Perhaps the problem here is that her undergraduate program had already been watered down too much, which is particularly shameful for a program in the hard sciences. My studies were on the other half of campus--liberal arts and then the law, the requirements of which are in some ways more inscrutable, but admittedly often less rigorous, at least in undergraduate. FWIW, I often don't do well with scholarly vocabulary, either. I often like to do deep dives into historical material, and the vocabulary shifts over time, even over the course of a decade or less. So while I was often much more well read than any other student, I'd often use terms with more archaic definitions in mind, which could make me sound like an imbecile. (Ditto regarding concepts as the textbook delineations are always fuzzier for me having read various primary sources which progressed across time to give a concept it's modern shape. I understood that modern shape, but it takes so much more effort to articulate clearly as you're struggling to suppress and mask out the inherent complexity.) I'm also a stutterer, which means I often sound like an imbecile from the first moment someone hears me stutter.