It's GDC week -- no class! Have a great conference!
Here are some interesting tech are techniques we don't have time to get into this semester but should be on your radar nonetheless.
A technique that "marches" a ray of light out from each pixel in the fragment shader to simulate volumes like clouds, procedural geometry like signed distance fields, or many other effects!
Related to ray marching Signed Distance Fields (or SDFs) are a technique to model geometry mathematically that can then be rendered using ray marching. The idea is to describe each shape as a function that takes a point in space and returns the shortest distance to the surface of the shape from that point. If you can describe your geometry and geometry operators like that you can do all kinds of powerful things.
Beyond vertex and fragment shaders, compute shaders can run arbitrary computations on the GPU unrestricted by the rendering pipeline. No shader toys because they are not available in the browser yet!
You can perform effects in screen-space, i.e. in the fragment shader, that would be difficult to do in earlier stages. This is a good place to fake things like reflection and cavity darkening which would require costly ray tracing to do "for real"
Unity's modern rendering pipeline is scriptable, meaning you have a lot of control over the details of how the engine's lights, camera and objects interact with the GPU. It's so flexible that under the hood the URP and HDRP are both built on it, and it's something you can leverage for yourself too!