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I have a compsci degree from a research university and I did a lot of “undergraduate research.” So, I’m acquainted with academia. I can tell you right now that a lot of math is just practice. By this I mean, they explain a concept in class, and then you have to do six gorillion exercises that suss out all the weird little “gotcha” scenarios that come with it. You memorize formulae by writing them out every single time you have to do one of these exercises, doing it dozens of times. This is the drudgery segment of a math education.

However, once you get algebra, calculus, set theory, and graph theory down, other, supposedly more “advanced” mathematics are actually easier to pick up. It goes from learning how to do algebra and calc to just memorizing a new formula, and once you’re out in the “real world” you never even need to do that.