Dorsa Amir has an excellent post titled Modest Advice For New Students. If you are going to read one thing about doing well in graduate school, click on the link and read that instead—it’s exhaustive and very wise. But if you’re going to read two things, read this current post as well, because I say some things that Dorsa doesn’t.
I won’t discuss here whether you should attend graduate school. Maybe another post.
This is meant as non-obvious advice. I’m skipping the common-sense stuff like “Get enough sleep” and “Learn to use AI well”, and going a bit less intuitive. This means my advice is more likely to be wrong!
Read widely.
The topics that interest psychologists, such as racial biases, object recognition, sentence comprehension, the treatment of schizophrenia, the enjoyment of music, and perceptions of fairness, are also studied by people in many other disciplines. You can learn a great deal, then, by reading works in fields such as neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, and sociology. Actually, some of the most interesting ideas these days are from people who aren’t in academia at all. (I’ve picked up a lot more from Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten than from any psychology journal.)
It’s shocking to me that some psychologists, including many graduate students, limit their reading to psychology journals. (For more on this, and more on how to do interdisciplinary research properly, see here.) Reading broadly provides new ideas for studies, introduces you to new theories, and overall makes you smarter and more interesting.1
Attend conferences, workshops, and other events.
It’s fun. You learn about new stuff, make friends, maybe establish new collaborations, and perhaps even fall in love.
Get really good at stats.
This is a do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do sort of thing. For a Psychology professor, my own statistical chops are at best average, and I often find myself relying on collaborators. This isn’t bad if you’re a full professor, but it can be disastrous if you’re a graduate student and stuck with an advisor like me. Also, and I’m sorry to say this, but you should consider the possibility that you might not get a job in academia. Being proficient in statistics will make you more appealing to employers in tech, consulting, and other fields.
Write regularly.
Many students hate writing. Work on it and get better, and then you’ll like it more. The good news is that AI is transforming writing in ways that make it much easier; the bad news is that these have all sorts of moral and practical perils. (I hope to address this in a future post.) Anyway, writing is important. Here are some wise words from Adam Mastroianni.
In grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”2
You’ll be asked to be on committees—the one to say yes to is the colloquium committee.
You get to meet cool people.
—
All of the above is more, more, more. So what do you cut back on?
You should probably spend less time on teaching.
Look, I know this is going to piss people off, so I’ll qualify it immediately. I love teaching; I take teaching seriously; I even write posts about how to teach. If you are teaching or TA-ing, you should strive to do a good job. And finally, this advice obviously doesn’t apply if you’re focused on getting a teaching position—so long as you're planning on applying to places where they don’t have high expectations about research productivity.3
But if you’re planning on a research career, you have to be aware of the trade-offs here.4 I’ve seen many sharp students devote an enormous amount of time to their teaching responsibilities and even take on additional teaching jobs that aren’t required. I know that many do so because teaching is, in the short term, more rewarding than research. It’s less solitary; it feels great when a class goes smoothly; it doesn’t have the anxiety and fear of failure that comes from doing research and writing papers. I get that. In graduate school, I signed up for an extra course to teach because it gave me an excuse to avoid writing my dissertation. But I’m here to help you, and I’ll tell you that, in the long run, if you’re aiming for a research career, spending too much time on teaching is a poor decision.
I say “read”, but I include podcasts, videos, and so on.
I’ll add that I find this a somewhat odd way of putting it, like saying having a child is changing diapers and then, later, driving them back and forth to play dates, and then, later, paying for their college. Yes, true, but being a professor or being a parent is more than the low-level activities that make up that role. Adam’s advisor Dan (Gilbert) also makes great scientific discoveries. Parenting is also an adventure in love and meaning. But the relevant point here is that Adam is right—academics do spend an awful lot of time writing.
More than one graduate student at Yale has said to me that if they don’t end up as a professor in a major research university, they’ll take seriously the idea of settling for a position at a selective liberal arts college like Williams, Swarthmore, or Barnard. I then had to give them the bad news that jobs at these places are extremely tough to get—everyone wants to work there, and to have a shot, you have to be top-notch at both teaching and research.
You can be more cold-blooded than that. When I was an undergraduate, I excitedly recommended to my advisor that he read a book I came across. He stared at me, sighed, and said, “Look, Paul, there are two kinds of people. Those who read books … and those who write them.” He was teasing me, of course (he was a voracious reader), but it was a reminder of the zero-sum nature of the academic workflow.
Your first advice of reading widely really hits strong, especially since it not only connects with writing regularly but also enhances thought processes. I want to study psychology when I go to college but I'm also thinking about learning about philosophy or music. So when I'm reading about these topics I often see connections between multiple different fields of studies, and it's interesting to connect the dots in my mind. I think I'll be open to reading about many other topics throughout the rest of my high school years before gradually gaining deeper knowledge.
I'm about to become director of graduate studies so have been thinking a lot about AI. It would be nice to think that the students who apply to grad school are the ones who held out against the temptations of AI, and so wrote their own papers and did all of the assigned reading. But we have to anticipate that some did not, and will arrive to grad school hoping to bamboozle their graduate professors in the same way the bamboozled their undergraduate ones. The advice I want to give them is: You need to leave now. You might be able to fake your way through one class but you won't be able to fake your way to tenure. (I hope that's true.)