Ariel has been bugging me to post on this here blog, so I guess I'll oblige by posting some general advice for grad school success. Of course, I don't quite know how other programs work, and everyone is different, but I'd say the following tips are pretty universal.
1) Get, and keep, a schedule. Treating school like a job is crucial. It allows you to get moving on your homework early, which is good. Also, don't harbor any illusions about not doing work. You will be doing a ton of work, and it can eat up all the time in your week if you let it. That isn't healthy, so keeping a schedule makes everything manageable. Personally, I was always in the library between 8:30 and 9:00 (even when I had class at 10:30), and worked until around sometime between 6:00-7:30. Do that everyday, and you're putting in 60-70 hours a week, which IS enough time to do all your work, plus you have several free hours every night.
2) Find a good study group. I don't know how it works at other schools, but at Chicago, about 2/3 of the kids were in study groups. I spent about 95% of my study time with the group, and I can honestly say I would have done very, very poorly without them.
There's two basic approachs to study groups. One, everyone does the work by themselves and then discuss it as a group and go over parts people didn't get. Two, do ALL the work in the group, from start to finish. My group was of the latter type, and it worked very well for us, but you have to be careful about it. In particular, if you find you rely too much on others for coming up with the answers, you might not be learning as much as you should be. Be careful about free-riding, it will only hurt you in the long run.
3) Have fun. This is also super-important. I don't mean that you have to find all your work exciting and interesting. I mean that, to stay sane, you have to have some kind of outside life or interests. All of my friends were in the Econ department, but doing things like going to parties, or being involved in intramural sports made my year much more manageable. You can't (and shouldn't) work 100 hours a week all year long. Again, this comes back to good time management.
4) Don't look at answers. Over the course of last year, I had access to the answers for maybe about 50% of my problem sets, as they were recycled from the previous year. A few of my classmates were clearly reliant on these for finishing their problem sets (especially those that worked alone). In my opinion, this seriously hurt their education. It is way too easy to start on a problem, get stuck on something and, instead of working through it, going immediately to the solutions to get the answer. Don't do it!
This is especially problematic for the following reason. A lot of the work in grad school is of the type where, if you read the answers or listen to someone else's solutions, you will be able to follow it completely, but then be unable to rederive the results yourself, especially in slightly different contexts. It is crucial that you learn the tricks of the problems yourself, and the only way to do that is to figure them out for yourself.
I see I've gone on quite a bit. I probably could talk a lot more, but I think these are some good general tips for success in grad school. I'll probably write more later at some point about my actual experience last year (preview: I liked it a lot, except for game theory).
