4 ms·

I am currently a PhD student. In my experience, I've had to navigate my way in unusual directions in order to work on things I'm interested in, rather than just

by ssivark 10y ago

I am currently a PhD student. In my experience, I've had to navigate my way in unusual directions in order to work on things I'm interested in, rather than just go with the flow to collect publications. I talk with several of my peers who are unhappy with the choices academia offers, and would be open to the thought of pursuing research without being a career academic in the conventional sense. The biggest hurdle that comes up is the feeling of being alone -- not knowing other people who are trying to hack the system and do things differently. Since there seems to be some traction along the lines of independent research pursuits here, I'd like to pass out a quick survey I just created, for people currently trying to pursue academic research on their own path (or interested in doing so): https://goo.gl/forms/wLvkGPstpCCBJY513 https://goo.gl/forms/wLvkGPstpCCBJY513 It's very preliminary, but I thought it might be a good start to get some discusion going. I invite responses/comments, either here, or on the survey form.

anbende 10y ago
Also a current PhD student, and I've definitely found myself frustrated with the way that academia seems to be at odds with my desire to work on the things that I think are not only the most interesting but the most important. I look around and see the profs working on so many projects that just seem so small and limited. I'm in psych and we have a problem where dozens of people are running competing/overlapping experiments that are all critically underpowered and/or divided into least publishable chunks with little thought to broader importance or applicability. The whole situation really makes me want to ultimately do my research outside of the establishment, but I recognize that collaborations and publications are a key part of credible science. In order to do that I figure that I will need a platform for recruiting participants and conducting experiments for the kind of research that I would want to do. Ideally the platform would be compelling enough to bring in researchers in academia (or elsewhere). So I'm working on that platform. That's the programming project that brought me to HN. I filled out your questionnaire. Not sure if my project is related to your frustrations, but it seems somewhat close. Either way I share your pain.
- jnicholasp 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on the platform you're building? What is it, how does it work, what problems do you think it solves, etc.?
  - anbende 10y ago
    I can go into a little bit. I don't want to totally out myself when I'm still a months away from a product that I could demonstrate. Bottom line is that the online experimentation tools for large swaths of psychological research (questionnaires mainly but also cognitive tasks) aren't well handled by the big current players in that market. We're just not a big enough value proposition. The tools aren't designed for us. We really need for participants be able to just login to the experiment and be taken through the whole process. We need tools to track their participation, send reminder emails, etc that are built in to the experiment rather than cobbled together around it. And what most of us would like is for it to spit out a cohesive dataset at the end, ideally with at least some of the data-cleaning done (and documented) for us. A lot of research is cobbled together from a bunch of different tools that spit out separate chunks of data that need to be painstakingly re-constituted at the end. This may not be true for all academic research, but it is for the research that I'm targeting. So there's a value proposition there with a market of tens of thousands of grant-funded researchers. In addition, I have access to several local sources of potential data collection (outside of academia) that are extremely appealing to an important subset of the researchers who might use my platform. I'm currently working with three such groups, but if things worked well there, there are hundreds if not thousands of such places in North America and Europe (and elsewhere). So I'd potentially be able to offer researchers not only a fairly comprehensive suite of tools for collecting data, but I'd have a growing network of recruitment sites so researchers could really just design it and click 'go' (and pay me). This isn't all of it, just the research side. I'm pretty sure that the same set of tools can be used to go after a couple other non-academic markets as well. I've got at least 2 other non-academic revenue opportunities that I think are pretty solid and can be explored in tandem. Then there are the long-term plans that change everything... (cartoonish evil laugh)
    - 10y ago

by ssivark 10y ago

anbende 10y ago

Also a current PhD student, and I've definitely found myself frustrated with the way that academia seems to be at odds with my desire to work on the things that I think are not only the most interesting but the most important. I look around and see the profs working on so many projects that just seem so small and limited. I'm in psych and we have a problem where dozens of people are running competing/overlapping experiments that are all critically underpowered and/or divided into least publishable chunks with little thought to broader importance or applicability. The whole situation really makes me want to ultimately do my research outside of the establishment, but I recognize that collaborations and publications are a key part of credible science. In order to do that I figure that I will need a platform for recruiting participants and conducting experiments for the kind of research that I would want to do. Ideally the platform would be compelling enough to bring in researchers in academia (or elsewhere). So I'm working on that platform. That's the programming project that brought me to HN. I filled out your questionnaire. Not sure if my project is related to your frustrations, but it seems somewhat close. Either way I share your pain.

jnicholasp 10y ago
Can you elaborate on the platform you're building? What is it, how does it work, what problems do you think it solves, etc.?
- anbende 10y ago
  I can go into a little bit. I don't want to totally out myself when I'm still a months away from a product that I could demonstrate. Bottom line is that the online experimentation tools for large swaths of psychological research (questionnaires mainly but also cognitive tasks) aren't well handled by the big current players in that market. We're just not a big enough value proposition. The tools aren't designed for us. We really need for participants be able to just login to the experiment and be taken through the whole process. We need tools to track their participation, send reminder emails, etc that are built in to the experiment rather than cobbled together around it. And what most of us would like is for it to spit out a cohesive dataset at the end, ideally with at least some of the data-cleaning done (and documented) for us. A lot of research is cobbled together from a bunch of different tools that spit out separate chunks of data that need to be painstakingly re-constituted at the end. This may not be true for all academic research, but it is for the research that I'm targeting. So there's a value proposition there with a market of tens of thousands of grant-funded researchers. In addition, I have access to several local sources of potential data collection (outside of academia) that are extremely appealing to an important subset of the researchers who might use my platform. I'm currently working with three such groups, but if things worked well there, there are hundreds if not thousands of such places in North America and Europe (and elsewhere). So I'd potentially be able to offer researchers not only a fairly comprehensive suite of tools for collecting data, but I'd have a growing network of recruitment sites so researchers could really just design it and click 'go' (and pay me). This isn't all of it, just the research side. I'm pretty sure that the same set of tools can be used to go after a couple other non-academic markets as well. I've got at least 2 other non-academic revenue opportunities that I think are pretty solid and can be explored in tandem. Then there are the long-term plans that change everything... (cartoonish evil laugh)
  - 10y ago