It is sad but this mentality seems to have spread to the U.S. at least in the form of Chinese grad students. It isn't very intellectually stimulating to discus

It is sad but this mentality seems to have spread to the U.S. at least in the form of Chinese grad students. It isn't very intellectually stimulating to discuss chemistry with someone whose idea of being great in Organic Chemistry is having memorized Org Chem textbooks in English before he could speak English. What is worse is that professors admire the amount of work Chinese students put in compared to their American counterparts. I feel a lot of pressure to work mindlessly and without any creativity. I think that this model of education is not sustainable and will damage American higher education in the long run. Sometimes I feel out of place in graduate school in an engineering department. I'm the only person I know of here who reads Faulkner and listens to Coltrane in his spare time. I get the feeling that if I told my adviser that I was teaching myself French on the weekends, he would consider it a waste of time. Not that reading Faulkner helps me learn Quantum Chemistry, but I feel like a well rounded education will help me make breakthroughs later in Quantum Chemistry. But I'm finding that dissatisfaction with the slavishly work hard in one chosen area is the minority opinion and it is hard not to be disheartened by this.