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. ;-)
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.
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.
Wow. I'm a student in a research microbiology lab and I could give a rough overview of the projects of everyone in my lab, and the neighbouring sister microbiolgy lab too. There's no room for charades because one of the first questions scientists ask each other at social events of any kind is "so, what do you do/ work on?" Not to mention how much you need to rely on others just to get basic experiments in reasonable shape.
I am part of this area of high school / pre college research and part of a high school that is successful in having students reach high levels of high school research including myself, so I can shed some insight. These kinds of stories show up all the time and it is usually the case that they have received some kind of outside help. But in the world of competitive high school research, there is a lot more emphasis on making innovations which are successful and more immediately applicable at the trade off of being something superficial or abandoning projects or ideas that don't appear to be immediately amazing or successful since they are easy to quickly dismiss in a competitive environment. However, there are plenty of amazing students who go on and win ISEF and other top competitions who collaborate with professors and engineers and I certainly encourage collaboration like this. Although, within my own research, I have remained independent since at my school, my research director's and other research teachers' main field is in biology or chemistry, leaving little domain specific assistance for me who has perused projects with heavy electrical engineering and computer science knowledge and skills. I have tried to reach out to professors before, but I can be hard to find someone whose project ideas and interests align with yours (without having to travel long distances to meet and work with them at their universities which I am able to do). The world of high school research is fiercely competitive and without some kind of collaboration or connections with professors and professionals, it becomes almost impossible to reach the top and be successful. I have managed to do this on my own but it has been a struggle and very competitive and hard journey in which I regret not finding someone such as a professor to work with. I sometimes worry that my research friends and high schoolers that pursue research will abandon or forget about the idea core values of research and collaboration in the unforgiving world of high school competitive research. I know this has kinda turned into a rant but if you have any questions about the world of competitive research or my own research I would be glad to talk about it since I rarely see this subject talked about outside of the high school research community.
Did you go to a university? If so, do you think you got more out of "throwing money" at professors than you would have just trying to figure out [physical chemistry | architectural design | machine learning] yourself?
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.
Not true in the life sciences either. For one you usually pick a group that's working on problems that interest you. I always got to work on my own projects as long as they fit in the broader interests of the group, which interested me in the first place
To illustrate just how hard: much of my work in academia was assisting in designing experiments or analyzing data for other people working on PhDs in "how to design decent tests" (i.e., Instructional Psychology). There was an entire department of the university dedicated to studying just that problem.
Wow, those who could find their own research topic were lucky.
I've never seen anyone in my environment get that much freedom.
The supervisor sets the problem and the student must solve it.
Edit: I was under the impression that even the postdocs
are hired for a specific task.
In my PhD field (physics), there was a middle ground for most students.
Proposing a research project is a lot like pitching a product idea. If you bring your own money, or don't need any, then you can do whatever you want, including failing. If you need funding, space, collaboration, mentoring, whatever, then your pitch has to mesh with the interests with other people.
But even if given a project, it's not really a "project" in the sense of having a plan, budget, and timeline. Depending on the professor, the project may just be a vague concept, with no idea of how to carry it out. That was the case with my thesis project. I started with an inchoate idea, and ended up developing an experimental technique that opened up a new research program for my advisor.
There are professors who assign cookie cutter projects, and I think it's a disservice to their students.
Another example: A friend of mine who is a MIT/Harvard Biology PhD works as an analyst reading research papers and deducing the likelihood of the drugs proposed by smaller pharma pure play companies will pan out.
He says he was never good in the lab but was always proficient and prolific at reading papers, and finds it to be a bit of a calling for him.
From time to time the media will release puff pieces about a "genius" high school student that discovered something/invented something/won some national science fair "with the help of a local university lab/professor".
I used to think that these actually were genius kids that spent their free time pursuing scholarly pursuits and somehow befriending professors.
But what I've seen happen (multiple times) is that a lab PI convinces one of their grad-students/post-docs that "it would be a great mentorship opportunity for you to have <highshool student that just so happens to be my friend's kid> finish up that project you've been working on".
The end result is that some well-connected kid gets credit for the whole project on their applications, but the grad-student/post-doc that has already done 95% of the work just has to hand it over and can't use/publish their own experiment
Can somebody give a quick rundown of how university research works?
What's the motivation to work on a potentially big idea rather than something you personally find great interest in?
Wouldn't it be best to just work on whatever interests you most, or is there such a wealth of branches you could go off into, that one feels the need to narrow it down and this is one of the ways to do that?
That’s often the case in research. For my first 6-8 months in my new lab I pretty much spend most of my mental energy finding how to combine my own research interests while fitting in the lab (i.e. do something that my prof would approve). It’s mostly solved now, in part by doing some side project secretly, but the big take away is that politics is actually an important part of how research is done in real life.
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. ;-)
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