When one of us, Faith, joined the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), she worked as she’d done at Stanford: she followed the rules on assignments.

So, she turned in her “assignment” (an Excel spreadsheet crunching sales analytics) and waited for a manager to tell her what to do next. Her manager, however, expected Faith to be proactive and propose something.

Faith thought she was following directions (what she was “supposed to do”), but Faith’s manager thought she was being passive — and told her as much in their feedback session.

Why had “following directions” been a bad thing? And how was she supposed to know she needed to propose next steps?

As it turns out, college mindsets don’t always translate perfectly to the workforce — or at all!

Likewise, when Katherine came back to Stanford to visit after a year working in consulting, she thought, I’ve gone backwards. As a student, she’d sit in Arrillaga studying linear algebra, econometrics or multivariate calculus. As a working adult, she sat in that same spot and instead moved colored boxes on a PowerPoint slide. She’d implicitly assumed that corporate work would be as intellectual as Stanford was.

Both Faith and Katherine had similar versions of the same thought: What’s wrong with us?

It turns out that the attitudes which lead us to Stanford and get us through Stanford don’t always work as well after Stanford. New work environments have new rules.

As two alumni who transitioned to the corporate world right after Stanford, there are two things we wished we’d known. First, problem-solving doesn’t mean what you think it means. At Stanford, it often means solving well-defined problems. In the corporate world, problems are often way more vague and amorphous. Second, corporate work is often not intellectually rigorous. We’ll discuss both these situations below.

Solving vague, amorphous problems

You’ve probably done a bunch of interviews in the search for a job or internship. Chances are, when the interviewer asks you what you’re looking to get out of the opportunity, you say, “Among other things, I want to solve problems.”

Well, you’ll be solving problems.

But those problems almost certainly do not require you to work through mathematical functions describing Cobb-Douglas preferences, or to explain to your SLE section how the Hegelian dialectic influenced Marx’s thinking or to debate the pros and cons of the federal government implementing Alexander Hamilton’s plan to assume the newfound nation’s debt.

Some of the hardest problems at work are not technical problems.

In fact, they’re often maddeningly vague or amorphous. Yes, in a Stanford context, we consider non-STEM subjects to be “fuzzy”. But the assignments and tasks that professors provide at an undergrad level for “fuzzy” subjects are usually much more well-defined than the problems presented in the corporate world.

Problems in the corporate world typically ask, “How do we format this brochure to get more prospects to respond to our ad?” Or, “How do we reformulate this response to satisfy a finicky client?”

Whereas your undergrad professors almost always know the answers (or the stated/acceptable answers) to problems they give you, your manager may not know the answer. Maybe they’ve never experienced this situation before.

In other words, in the world of work, you’re working on problems that may not have an already-identified solution, so your input can be (and often is!) valuable to your manager.

Returning to our example: Faith had done the sales analysis, her manager hadn’t. Faith’s insight into the sales trends was therefore useful to her manager and team, because she could suggest a direction for further analysis based on what she’s seen.

Similarly, in college, professors give you basically what you need to solve problem sets. At the very least, you know what concepts you need to master.

But your managers can’t give you directions every step of the way. They don’t know everything that you’ll need to complete a task. And the task itself might change as the manager receives more information (either from his manager, or from the client, or from the market, or from some other source).

So as you and your manager work through problems, it can be helpful if you proactively propose a solution to them.

You probably won’t be able to supply the “right” solution. But at least it’s a jumping-off point.

Most work isn’t intellectual

The second thing we wish we knew: much of corporate work is communication-related (sending emails, Slack messages or answering phone calls) — and doesn’t require much intellectual work.

Instead, this work can often feel like drudgery: chasing down stakeholders, constantly following up or reminding people you need something from them, or sitting through meetings with no clear agenda. Sometimes you’ll have to redo work that one manager wanted done in a particular way, but which a different manager wanted in a different way for no clear reason.

If you work at a venture capital firm which requires you to source dozens of prospective startups and then email them each day, you’ll spend a lot of time on quick Google searches, rather than intellectually rigorous or thought-provoking activities. If you’re in a customer service role, you’ll spend a lot of time helping irate customers, rather than performing long stretches of focused deep work. If you’re in a sales role, you’ll probably spend a lot of time going to networking events or cold-calling prospects.

Stanford is a bubble in more ways than one. Some of this is good, but one of the biggest changes is that at Stanford, intellectual work is largely considered the most important type.

After Stanford, being able to get things done matters much more.

Solving fuzzy — as opposed to techy — problems and working on non-intellectual work as the majority of our jobs were only the tip of the iceberg of things that we, Faith and Katherine, learned post-grad. While working on a book about more things we’ve learned, we’ve spoken to dozens of Stanford alumni — and look forward to speaking to more Stanford people.

To be sure, you’ll learn stuff at Stanford that’s applicable to the corporate world. But sometimes, it’ll come more from the interactions you have with friends and classmates than from specific class material. Sometimes leading a group through the steam tunnels teaches you just as much about managing a meeting as reading about organizational theory does. Sometimes sitting next to a lonely-looking person in the dining hall helps you develop the skills to build cohesion on a team.

So, in addition to submitting your p-sets on time, don’t forget to hang out with friends, meet new people and enjoy campus!