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I think I agree completely with asquare. RA work can be incredibly useful if you want to do anything applied, though of course it depends on the prof.
Moreover, I think it's kind of unreasonable to plan to take the entire PhD core before attending a PhD program. It is almost certainly harder than you think, especially coming from outside of the group of PhD students.
Taking a couple of PhD-level courses and doing well in them is a great signal, but I think that taking the entire core both increases the likelihood that your performance will be only mediocre (or worse) and fails to provide a better signal than just taking one or two courses.
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