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.
No, reading wildly about biases would take you to the understanding of how all biases are formed in the brain before it even gets to the prejudicial ones such as racial biases.
Reading wildly about racial biases would only make your memorising of identity politics stories well covered and ready to replicate and nothing else.
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.)
Perhaps a non-obvious approach to getting a good academic job might also be to speak other languages fluently? The US is (non-obviously?) Not the only choice in this great wide world eh?!
Read wildly about racial biases..
No, reading wildly about biases would take you to the understanding of how all biases are formed in the brain before it even gets to the prejudicial ones such as racial biases.
Reading wildly about racial biases would only make your memorising of identity politics stories well covered and ready to replicate and nothing else.
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.)
Perhaps a non-obvious approach to getting a good academic job might also be to speak other languages fluently? The US is (non-obviously?) Not the only choice in this great wide world eh?!