[Originally posted last September; I’m posting it again with minor edits because it’s a new academic year.]
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 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 it also brings 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 this advice obviously doesn’t apply if you’re focused on getting a teaching position—so long as you're applying to places where they don’t have high expectations for research productivity.3
But if you’re planning a research career, you have to be aware of the trade-offs. 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 many do so because, in the short term, teaching is more rewarding than research. It’s less solitary; it feels great when a class goes smoothly; it doesn’t carry the anxiety and fear of failure that comes with 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 playdates, 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.