research is hard !

When I look back and evaluate the system that educated me, I find a lot of flaws. All we were supposed to do was to look for answers in the textbook and not think about the questions at all. If the question started as ``Why did Pallav leave his home?", the first reaction we had was to thumb thru the pages of the chapter and scan for a line which started with or contained the clause( or is it phrase?) "..Pallav left his home because...",
and as most of us will testify , ``Bingo" ! The same went for the science exams, there were set questions and set answers to those questions, all we had to do was to mug them up. It was more of a guessing game. "Ok , lets see, she ( the Teacher of course) has already asked question no. 1, 5 , and 7 in the mid term test and last week she enquired about how well we had studied the photosynthesis portion, so this fixes ( we used the word ``pukka") a 5mark question on photosynthesis; now lets see about the remaining 15 marks.....". As you can pretty well imagine, there was no scope for the awakening of the spirit of enquiry, which to this date, i suspect, lies still dormant. Given that now I am a research scholar, this does tell me as to how natural a part I have played in conveying to the Board/University of my most ``sincere" plans of being a researcher.
Cribbing has never given the right solution to any problem, so the real question to ask now is this:what have I got myself into?