Picking A Research Topic


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Picking A Research Topic
Leslie Pray

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I started grad school with a romantic notion that I'd be spending my summers on a little island off the coast of northern California, sleeping beneath the star-studded midnight sky. I imagined myself waking up to the rising sun, packing my lunch, and carrying my spotting scope over my shoulder in search of a spot in the craggy cliffs where I would set up and spend the day observing and recording cormorant behavior. Instead, I ended up spending my days and nights in a lab counting, observing, and maintaining thousands of populations of flour beetles.

The reality of doing science—and getting a degree—hit me hard my first semester. I realized that there was a lot more to it than sitting in a field (or on a cliff) with a notebook in hand. As much as I wanted to be in the outdoors, I also wanted to learn how to formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and collect and interpret data. Sure, I could have done all those things in the field. But I didn't want to be slowed down by the many obstacles that inevitably come with doing science in the outdoors. As a graduate student with only a limited amount of time, I wanted a guarantee that I would have data to analyze and results to publish. So I decided to leave battling the elements for later. It wasn't an easy decision. After all, it was my love for the outdoors that had attracted me to biology in the first place. I had never imagined myself as a lab scientist.

Picking a research topic may be the most difficult decision you make as a grad student. I've known and heard about first-year grad students become so riddled with anxiety about "finding the perfect thesis topic" that they become second-year and sometimes even third-year and (dare I say) fourth-year students who are still hovering at the starting gate. But there is no perfect thesis topic. Or rather, the perfect thesis topic is the one that gets you doing the research, keeps you coming back to the lab day after day and night after night and, ultimately, gets you that degree.

So how do you find the "perfect" topic? Well, you've got to hit the ground running because it takes a lot of time and hard work. Your research topic is not going to magically land in your lap. As soon as you start grad school, seek out interesting topics and think about them. Read journal articles, engage with your advisor, talk with your professors, pick the brains of the postdocs in your lab or department, attend seminars, go to meetings, and do whatever you can to get in the thick of it as soon as you can. If you plan to pursue a career in industry, find out what kinds of research and, perhaps more importantly, research tools are most applicable to the type of work you want to do. Most departments require some sort of thesis or dissertation proposal to be submitted before students begin their research. But don't wait until then to ask for feedback. Participate, explore, and be actively involved with your courses, lab meetings, journal clubs, or whatever other opportunities for "talking chemistry" present themselves.

Participating in a new or ongoing project with more experienced scientists is a great opportunity for exposure to new research ideas since good research usually raises more question than it answers. At the end of my first year of grad school, I started a collaborative project with my advisor, another faculty member, and a postdoc. The four of us sat down and talked about the idea, designed the experiment, and then carried it out. As the only grad student working on the project, I did most of the work. But I didn't mind. Not only did the experience give me some bold new ideas and the confidence to strike out on my own, but also it landed me a first-authored publication in a prestigious journal in my field.

Striking out on your own doesn't necessarily mean taking on an entirely new topic that nobody in your department, let alone lab, knows anything about. I've known grad students who take on projects that are so different from anything that their advisors have ever done that the students end up teaching the advisors more than the advisor teach them. Sure, as a grad student you are supposed to be learning how to do original, independent research. But the key word is "learning." Graduate school is an apprenticeship and an opportune time to be an opportunist. If you're not learning from your advisor, you may be selling yourself short. There are some very good scientists out there who even the best of us can still be learning from. Furthermore, by working on a topic that complements your advisor's research program, your advisor will likely be able to better advise you when you run into problems (which you will), and you'll likely have an easier time finding and accessing the kind of equipment and supplies you'll need.

That said, I would never advise anyone to give up something that they are really burning to study in favor of something that seems a little more doable. In fact, rule #1 is: pick a topic that you like. Not only will you be completely consumed by your research topic for the next several or more years, chances are that your dissertation topic will profoundly shape the direction of your future research. Many illustrious scientific careers revolve around variations on the theme of the dissertation. Still, no matter what you do, you'll need to balance your desire to branch out on your own with the fact that you have only a limited amount of time to wrap it all up.

If you're going for your Master's, you may only have two or, at most, three years to begin and end a complete research project. Master's theses and projects are generally much shorter than the dissertation, and the standards are generally more relaxed, but the time crunch can cause just as much, if not more, anxiety as that of the PhD. Because of this, it is common for Master's students to take on an already established project, or an offshoot of one. Sometimes they'll do variations on a theme that a previous student has already done.

In your search for the "perfect" topic, remember that as a scientist-in-training (which is basically what you are as a grad student), nobody expects you to come up with brilliant, earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting theories. In fact, nobody expects that even of full-fledged scientists! You just need to keep your research going. And keep in mind what Thomas Kuhn wrote in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [italics are his]:

"The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skilful enough, he will success in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort. On most occasions any particular field of specialization offers nothing else do, a fact that makes it no less interesting to the proper sort of addict."

Leslie Pray is a freelance science writer based in Leverett, MA. She has written extensively on the educational and professional development of grad students and postdocs for Science's Next Wave and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is also a regular contributor to The Scientist. Leslie earned several national awards from scientific societies in recognition of her accomplishments as a graduate student. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Vermont.