Students with fellowships or outside support need to make extra efforts to interact with faculty members and network with fellow students. Graduate students don't get rich, but they don't starve. Think back to the transition you made from high school to college. Your first semester may have been a time of great upheaval as you adjusted to additional freedom and additional responsibilities. Most students find college much less structured than high school, and they need greater discipline to budget their time and complete long-range projects.
Graduate students have much the same reaction as they make the transition from undergraduate life.
A typical full-time course load is 9 hours. This means less time spent in class, but the demands of a graduate course are much greater than those of an undergraduate one, and students might spend three or four hours of preparation for every hour in class. A masters student typically completes a specified set of courses in the first year or so, and then spends time working on a research project with an individual faculty member. The entire process may take two years, perhaps three. Some schools allow a written exam plus a scholarly paper to substitute for the research project.