Reminds me a bit of some observations from my engineering courses. The math itself often would be not too difficult to solve (the academic part) but the real difficulty was how to translate the real life question posed by the examiner (the market or applied math part) into the equations. It's like they knew being able to tackle this difficulty is what makes for a good engineer. The math itself, one could just use tables, approximations and safety factors.

It was hard for me. Maybe that's why i took the more fundamental road, forfeiting the real life applications of it all~~