Verified by 
Some of the most important lessons I learned in grad school weren’t from my classes or dissertation. They were between the cracks of all that.
Fear can motivate
As a graduate of Queens College, I was nervous to come to lofty U.C. Berkeley for graduate school—they’d discover that I'm not that smart.
I was particularly scared about the statistics courses that were required. So, as soon as I arrived in Berkeley, I got the textbook for the first stats course. It was a month before classes were to start, but terrified of failing and getting kicked out, I forced myself to study the textbook for an hour each day. That kept my stress under control and me from failing.
Consider questioning authority
I learned another lesson early on. I gave writing my first paper my all, and my heart was pounding as the professor returned the papers. Across the top, he wrote on mine, “B. Should have been an F except you tried so hard. Go to the writing center.” Tail between my legs, I toddled there, where they urged me to be more precise.
I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but subconsciously, I didn’t like what they were urging. Their approach made my sentences accurate but boring, hard to read, sometimes impenetrable. They liked sentences with plenty of nuance-building qualifiers. I'm only moderately exaggerating to say they encouraged sentences like, “The preponderance of the evidence suggests X, Y, and Z, but there are countervailing variables that need be accounted for to avoid assigning excessive causation to some potentially irrelevant covariates.”
I was too callow and insecure to bring such doubts to consciousness let alone to raise a question about it, and good little boy, I dutifully wrote that way and did okay.
After I graduated, I wanted to write for the general public and showed a draft of my first effort to my neighbor, Ray Mattoon. Word by word, he showed me how I was sacrificing too much readability for the amount of precision gained. He was confirming what I previously couldn’t allow myself to think—that the vaunted UC Berkeley experts weren’t necessarily right, especially if I wanted to write for the public rather than for the handful of academics that would read a journal article. Since then, I've prioritized clarity in my writing and have had much published.
Give a different gift
My wife and I were invited to a professor's home. Instead of the standard bottle of wine, my wife gave her a pie plate. Somehow, they bonded over that, chatted, and by the end of the evening, the professor asked my wife, “How’d you like to come to graduate school at Berkeley?” after which she was promptly admitted. Without that pie plate, I doubt it would have happened.
Don’t pay too big a price for prestige
I was flattered enough to have been admitted to Berkeley that I would do whatever they asked, even take the five required graduate-level statistics courses, even though I knew I’d never use most of that. Even more head-shaking, when a statistics professor asked if I would take a sixth one, internally, I screamed, "No!" but I smiled and said that I was honored that he’d ask me.
Take some control
I couldn't understand why I was assigned a particular advisor—his research was on something I had shown no interest in: paired-associate learning, a tool for developing learning theory but, for me, too removed from the real world.
Finally, having taken a course from Michael Scriven, an expert on the evaluation of innovation, I asked if he would be my advisor, and fortunately he agreed. Not only did he shepherd me toward that important, practical field, but he has become a lifetime friend. He’s now 93 and we still speak every few days.
Here's another example of the need to take some control. The committee had approved my dissertation proposal. I'd get my degree if I followed that blueprint. I did and four of the five committee members approved the dissertation by, per tradition, signing its first page.
But the fifth professor asked me to come to his home, whereupon he said, “Marty, I think you should get another 100 subjects.” That would have taken at least another six months, it probably wouldn’t have changed the results, and besides, I had done what the committee, including he, said I needed to do. So, when he asked me to get another 100 subjects, I was in shock and unable to censor myself, blurted, “No.” He signed.
The takeaway
When we’re in a subservient position, whether to a boss or a university program, it’s tempting to kowtow. I'm not advocating an a-priori bias toward rebelling against authority, only that you avoid reflexive genuflection. Sometimes, you’re more expert, at least about you and your life, than are the experts.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
