V
Seven rules of research
December 1, 2008
There are seven guidelines that I’ve learned thus far regarding choosing topics of study and doing research.
Seven rules of research
Let’s back up again and continue along the lines I started in my post about building dissertations. Throughout my twenty-odd years in academics (as an undergraduate and master’s student at UVa; as staff at Caltech; and as a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University), I’ve learned much about choosing topics of study through talking with researchers, observing the choices graduate students have made and the outcomes that resulted, and through reading books like The Craft of Research. Now that I’m facing having to write papers and a dissertation of my own, I wanted to distill what I’ve learned into guidelines and write them down as reminders so that I don’t lead myself astray over the coming years.
There are seven guidelines that I’ve learned thus far:
- Ensure that your topic interests you intimately. This is probably the most important guideline I’ve learned. You’re going to be living this topic for years. The Craft of Research emphasizes this with good reason. If you don’t care about your topic, there’s a good chance that you’ll burn out and never finish your degree. Or you might finish and then abandon the field. I’ve seen both happen to dozens of people, including myself.
- Choose a topic in which you want to be known as an expert, possibly for a good portion of your career. My advisor and other teachers at CGU have emphasized this, and as a student in his late thirties, attending an expensive school as a mechanism to change careers, I had already internalized this before this before starting graduate school. You’re going to be living this topic for the years of your graduate work, and you’re going to get to know it intimately. When you graduate and go for job interviews (academic or otherwise), you’ll have a paper trail of publications on this topic, and your job talks will be on your dissertation. Ensure that the subject is relevant to the particulars of the career you want to pursue. For instance, if your career goals are to work in social networking technologies, don’t spend your graduate career on wireless technology adoption.
- Choose a topic that your advisor, your teachers or your fellow students can help you with. In a 2006 panel discussion, CGU faculty from varied fields emphasized that students who study topics their teachers have no familiarity with are at a disadvantage compared with students who choose topics within their teacher’s areas of expertise. Similarly, they said that students who have fellow students with which they can discuss their research are better off than those who don’t. Academic research areas are vast and take years to master. If you have no guidance, your research can be a long, lonely slog. There will be nobody to tell you how to start (by giving you a set of literature you should be familiar with) and guide you away from dead end paths, or paths that other people are already walking.
- Choose the smallest possible problem to research that still satisfies your committee. This is also known as “the perfect dissertation is one that is finished quickly.” Your primary goal as a Ph.D. student is to graduate quickly and get on with your life, not to get the Nobel Prize. You’ll have plenty of time in the next thirty or more years to do that.
- Tell a compelling story. Prof. Masakazu Konishi, who studies neuroethology at Caltech and is one of my former employers, emphasized this; The Craft of Research does also. Academic research is communication: it is meant to be shared and discussed. It’s not just about learning or doing the things that interest you. If you expect to be successful at researching, and especially if you expect to be paid to do it, the story you tell must be interesting (compelling, even) and meaningful. At the very least, you want your field to think your story is compelling. Better yet is to have people outside your field care about what you do.
- Tell a clean story. Another one from Prof. Konishi. Restrict your scope of your story so that it focuses on only what you want to talk about. Do this so that your audience doesn’t get distracted by unanswered questions raised by barely related or broadly defined areas. From my graduate work at UVa in engineering, I learned to also restrict areas of variability that don’t add to your story. Use clean, compelling logic to tie hypotheses to experimental design, design your experiments to give you clear results, and be able to tie your results clearly back to your hypotheses.
- Stack the deck. Your experiments should tell you something interesting no matter whether your hypotheses are proved or disproved. One which Prof. Konishi was particularly emphatic about. You’re going to be spending a lot of time and effort doing the research for your dissertation: make sure that time is well spent by ensuring that you will find something interesting to report. The worst thing that can happen to you as a researcher is to spend years of your life to arrive at inconclusive (and hence, unpublishable) results. I’ve seen more than a handful of graduate students abandon their topics and begin anew because they saw that the experiments they had been designing and doing were not going to be conclusive.
Further Reading
- “Write good papers” by Daniel Lemire
- “How to Maximize Citations” by Peter Turney
- “Hints for New PhD students on How to Write Papers“ by Shahn Majid
Excellent advice.
Excellent advice to yourself. Of course, the first 4 are essentially related to “before the fact” and the last 3 to “after the fact”. Then there is “the fact” itself. Being motivated should help to drive you to the conclusion of the research, but lots of other things get in the way. It is important not to get distracted because that quickly creates inertia that it is hard to overcome.
I finished my PhD in four years, at a time when my peers were averaging six to seven years. In fact, I finished it in about three and a half years, but I had funding for four years, so I stretched it out a bit. I think my peers had the view that a dissertation should be a magnum opus, a world-transforming work that would be discussed for centuries. This is a paralyzing attitude. A dissertation is merely another step in what will hopefully be a long career. As Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” My advice is, aim for a good dissertation, not a perfect dissertation. I guess this is the same point as your number four.
I’m slightly worried by number two, “Choose a topic in which you want to be known as an expert.” I think it’s good advice, except to the extent that it suggests a researcher must become devoted to a narrow specialty. That makes me feel claustrophobic. I think research should be somewhat opportunistic. If you see an interesting problem and you have some ideas about how to solve it, then go for it; don’t worry that it’s not your area of expertise. Have plans, but be willing to abandon them. Being an expert can be a handicap, in that you get locked into certain ways of thinking, which blocks innovation.
Excellent points!
I hope the following doesn’t make me sound jaded, because I am not. Becoming an expert can be a life affirming event. I’ve just seen things that lead me to add the following to Mr. Malek’s list:
Choose your advisor wisely. Chances are if their life is screwed up, off kilter, chaotic or otherwise incongruous to your “path” it will have a negative, and possibly destructive, impact on your desire to learn, your will to endure years of study and deflate your neophyte optimism.
Just because Professor McBrainiac is an expert in the field and wants you as a grad student it does not mean that he/she is a caring, sympathetic, generous or even “normal.” I have seen faculty use grad students as pawns in department politics, subject field politics, as unpaid or underpaid labor and in one case a scapegoat. Advisors are people and they should be seen as a whole person, not just an “expert.” While they may not be your best friend, they do hold a good chunk of your future in their hands. Rarely in life, if ever, would you give so much power to one person. Choose wisely.
Choose wisely, because this person will be the large bright brand on your naked hide when you skinny dip into “your” research. Never forget that you are also diving into a social, cultural and political world that envelops that subject field. Every field has a swirling vortex of bad history, grudges, pedants, backstabbers, prima donnas, sycophants, lap dogs, schmoozers, groupies, axe grinders, wackjobs and, of course, darn good people. (Some say that academic politics make political politics look like a pillow fight.) When you enter post graduate studies, you are diving into this vortex naked as a jaybird with that brand showing large. His/her history, politics, personality will be thrust upon you for good or ill.
Caveat emptor.
@lorne: Thank you very much, Lorne, for reading this post and taking the time to comment on it. I like that framework you described which divides my points into “before the fact” and “after the fact” — the “fact” being doing the actual work of the research. If/when I rewrite this article into a new edition, I’ll break it down that way.
@Peter: Thank you, Peter, for reading my post! I’ve read your posts on doing research, and I read your blog, and I appreciate the thought you put into both.
I understand what you’re saying in your comments on number 2 “Choose a topic in which you want to be known as an expert.” You don’t want to limit yourself to a certain topic should something better or more lucrative come along. What I’m saying is more along the lines of: use care when choosing your topic. It’s not enough to choose something you love to do. I mean choose an area to work in that is not dying out or already done; that you will not get tired of before you graduate; that has enough to do in it that you can get more than one paper; that other researchers will care about. This is not to say that you can’t change your mind partway through your Ph.D., but this can be very costly.
Fundamentally, getting a Ph.D. is about getting a job, or should be. You’re paying a lot of money, blood and time to get it, so do work that helps you get a job doing something you love. I do think that search committees appreciate experts because then, they know what they are hirinig. I think that you have to be careful as a doctoral student to not appear to be to scattered in your interests.
Once you get that job (whatever it is), that’s another story. Time to be start looking at other opportunities, because it’s more lucrative and safe to do so at that point.
@Chuck: Chuck! I’m happy that you found this page, and read and took the time to comment on it. What you’ve written here is good advice, and if/when I write an updated version of this article, I’ll be including “choose your advisor wisely.” I’ve definitely seen both actual tyranny of the advisor, and the perceived tyranny (from the point of view of the student). This can be really, really important when the student is young and inexperienced in the world (as most Ph.D. students are), because they may not have the self confidence to stand up for themselves and adjust the relationship accordingly or find a new advisor. Or it may be that their sense of who they are or of their own self worth is not strong enough, and they’re looking for someone to tell them what to do, and that can screw them.
I will say that being an older student with years of work experience and who knows who they are and what they want really helps. With me, having 14 years experience in an academic environment, caught up in the fringes of academic politics and power games for much of it, I get to go in with my eyes that much more open than most students.