@Gaurav Well, essentially. Yeah. School serves a purpose. What purpose does it serve [for theoretical physics ed]? It doesn't choose books better than you can choose yourself. It gives you access to faculty/grad students for questions, but on bigger questions you could just ask it on stackexchange or physicsforums. In my experience it has just helped me with consistency!

Every time I read about QFT it's in terms of diagrams, legs, etc. etc.

Is there a way to do QFT math without having to think of everything in terms of a perturbation series?

@DanielSank As the great A. Zee once said $$\mathrm{QFT}=\sum \mathrm{diagrams}$$ Curiously, he built his career on nonperturbative QFT. Maybe he was being facetious.

@DanielSank Speaking of people at UCSB, Stan Peale died in May. t.e2ma.net/message/4mxuj/42x9vm

Now I'm sad, because I took stellar structure and evolution from him.

@dmckee Awwww. Sounds like he accomplished much.

You can't really ask for more than that in terms of one's life as a physicist.