Biology, and synthetic chemistry. Unfortunately all anecdotal. I live near a major research university, have lots of friends who are involved at all levels, and relatives who are even closer to it. It tends to be in areas that require minimal capital investment to pivot into a new study. Also, the student pursuing the original idea is hampered by their own emerging skills. "My student's thesis just got scooped" is something that every professor has experienced or knows about.
My field, physics, much harder. Building my experiment required a bunch of expensive equipment (maybe half a million in today's dollars), gear that I built myself, the technique of operating it, and so forth.
My career, much harder. I work in business. You learn about my ideas when a patent comes out. ;-)
New ideas are worth everything in science, especially when doing experiments.
When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months.
You see the effect every year, with students attempting the transition from teaching labs to actual research. In research you have to step back and use your knowledge in unfamiliar context. It is a big jump.
That's kind of my experience with research, but in physics. Already have three projects under my belt w/ no publishable results. All of them involved much more work than the other grad. students in my lab including building like three different instruments from scratch, but the other students have published. Their projects were much more "safe" than mine and their papers are pretty small, but at least they have papers.
I see that as fitting the same bill. You can't expect bachelor students to produce publisheable quality work, but solving a problem (if it includes gathering data and choosing theory to apply) is research within a very limited scope.
you can definitely learn more by working with/for someone else than by simply striking out on your own (too early) IF those people actually care about mentoring and have the ability to communicate their knowledge and experiences.
Sometimes working on your own ideas vs someone elses is very appealing regardless of how efficient the learning might be. So, sometimes I have to remind myself and others -- doing this is not just about efficiency.
I chuckle at the "Academics joke that "a month in the lab can save you an hour in the library." line in the post. What immediately came to my mind was something Click and Clack said : "reality often astonishes theory" ..which is why spending time in the dirty reality of building and experimenting (or even reproducing something you found in the library) is the yin to the library's yang.
There is a spectrum of the kinds of research one might do. My advisor always used to remind me that if a team of good engineers at a big corporation can do something, it's not a good research problem to tackle for a grad student in a uni lab. So we naturally tended to more speculative/fundamental problems, which seems like a good thing - instead of trying to compete with industry labs we augment them.
Sounds like you were ready to start some graduate courses and research in those areas rather than rehashing undergraduate material that you had already mastered. Graduate courses and research can be pretty interesting and rewarding.
Or perhaps ready to investigate some other subjects. For me many of the most beneficial and interesting courses and learning experiences are far afield from my primary work areas.
It often turns what could be a very fruitfull career- with contributions to a breakthrough- into a one-trick-pony.
My grandfather, a professor for chemistry, did as a student research on ion exchange resin - which later became valuable applied to water softeners. He did a lot of interesting research later when it came to analytical sciences (radio-chemistry) but that early success sort of over-shadowed everything.
Its a haunting experience, unless you dono longer externalize your value as a researcher.
Academics might look at your work, but you'll have to make lots of effort in explanation and providing context via comparisons with existing and previous work. It may or may not be worth it to you, but we aren't as unapproachable as you think; we even have a conference called Onward! for these kinds if ideas.
The goal is for the student to get some experience with performing their own research wherever that may lead them. This is actually a pretty impressive piece of independent work for an undergrad.
I would agree. I'm actually quite a few years out of school though, I have around 5 years of experience. I do have a bit of graduate-level experience but basically never did any real kind of research. That's why I think I'm struggling lol.
There's a point before collaboration, where you ask a researcher to bring a student up to the level of the researcher. At that point, the student and researcher struggle with similar enough problems that the researcher can think from the students perspective.
In the history of the paper she mentions some summer research, but that is for undergrads. Harvey Mudd is all undergrad and tends to emphasize teaching over research (at least, that was the philosophy 20 years ago o_O).
I was thinking more about physics. I believe that it takes longer for a student to reach the original research stage in physics.
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