Maybe that's the main difference. In the student days you're forced to learn enormous amounts of new skills in impossibly short time spans. Afterwards you kind of have to self motivate if you want to continue, and dive into research papers to get up to speed on the bleeding edge stuff since there's no real other study material available yet.

I've found myself mainly focusing on learning things from adjacent or unrelated fields instead, since I guess it's easier to get a grasp of the pre-grad stuff. It sure isn't making me any better at my job though lol.