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re: "The traditional way is to put off all creative aspects until the last part of graduate school. For seventeen or more years, a student is taught examsmanshi

re: "The traditional way is to put off all creative aspects until the last part of graduate school. For seventeen or more years, a student is taught examsmanship, then suddenly after passing enough exams in graduate school he's told to do something original." A lot can change over the last 35 years : http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5517&from=fund http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5517&from=fu...

graycat 11y ago
In practice, that undergrad research is mostly for biomedical wet lab research under close supervision of a much more senior person? There will be some issues of social maturity that can get in the way of the research. E.g., typically an undergrad student is still under some influence of some of the unfortunate attitudes of some of their high school teachers. E.g., after my junior year, I had a summer job in a bio-physics lab doing electronics. I knew Maxwell's equations well enough, but what I didn't know, and hurt a lot, was that I really needed to get the data sheets on some power transistors, read off some values, and, then, just apply Ohm's Law to characterize the usual operating range of those power transistors. I didn't have enough social maturity to do well enough asking others, and from high school I was too afraid just to use my own judgment, strike out into the unknown, and discover that all I had to do was just use the data sheets. That is, I guessed that digging into the data sheets would be too much of a detour and I'd get criticized. Also the guy I was working for kept emphasizing that I should take a practical approach and shouldn't go off into too much theory. Gee, I just needed to read the darned data sheets and, there, the curves that showed the basic, simple minded performance of the power transistors. Out of undergraduate school and in a job for a while and with some good successes, I came to have a sense of what where good, appropriate, and promising investments into the unknown. The lessons of high school conflicted with that "sense".
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  > In practice, that undergrad research is mostly for biomedical wet lab research ... ? Why would you assume I would bring up wet lab work in the context of mathematics? https://sites.google.com/site/mathreuprograms/ https://sites.google.com/site/mathreuprograms/ Here's a 20-year-old 20-year retrospective: http://www.d.umn.edu/~jgallian/tanglewood.html http://www.d.umn.edu/~jgallian/tanglewood.html
  - graycat 11y ago
    > Why would you assume I would bring up wet lab work in the context of mathematics? I was asking. Okay. Graph theory, etc.

graycat 11y ago

In practice, that undergrad research is mostly for biomedical wet lab research under close supervision of a much more senior person? There will be some issues of social maturity that can get in the way of the research. E.g., typically an undergrad student is still under some influence of some of the unfortunate attitudes of some of their high school teachers. E.g., after my junior year, I had a summer job in a bio-physics lab doing electronics. I knew Maxwell's equations well enough, but what I didn't know, and hurt a lot, was that I really needed to get the data sheets on some power transistors, read off some values, and, then, just apply Ohm's Law to characterize the usual operating range of those power transistors. I didn't have enough social maturity to do well enough asking others, and from high school I was too afraid just to use my own judgment, strike out into the unknown, and discover that all I had to do was just use the data sheets. That is, I guessed that digging into the data sheets would be too much of a detour and I'd get criticized. Also the guy I was working for kept emphasizing that I should take a practical approach and shouldn't go off into too much theory. Gee, I just needed to read the darned data sheets and, there, the curves that showed the basic, simple minded performance of the power transistors. Out of undergraduate school and in a job for a while and with some good successes, I came to have a sense of what where good, appropriate, and promising investments into the unknown. The lessons of high school conflicted with that "sense".

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
> In practice, that undergrad research is mostly for biomedical wet lab research ... ? Why would you assume I would bring up wet lab work in the context of mathematics? https://sites.google.com/site/mathreuprograms/ https://sites.google.com/site/mathreuprograms/ Here's a 20-year-old 20-year retrospective: http://www.d.umn.edu/~jgallian/tanglewood.html http://www.d.umn.edu/~jgallian/tanglewood.html
- graycat 11y ago
  > Why would you assume I would bring up wet lab work in the context of mathematics? I was asking. Okay. Graph theory, etc.