There really is one question that people should grapple with early in their academic path, and think about hard (because it is rarely deliberately posed as a qu

There really is one question that people should grapple with early in their academic path, and think about hard (because it is rarely deliberately posed as a question to students): Unless you are extremely talented and have some gift for a very specific topic or subfield, I would argue that finding a good environment (e.g. lots of adjacent collaborative research opportunities, and other productive students) and a good advisor is far more important than any particular thesis topic. What I have observed is that few people at the end of their academic careers (esp. those who decide to do something else later) would say that the topic of their thesis was really all that important. They might have equally chosen some other related topic out of sheer luck or accident. Far more important were the experiences of: -- developing critical thinking -- how to organize your life and work methods while trying to get a research project done -- how to collaborate with others and use self-initiative to seek out opportunities -- learning how to pick yourself up after ideas fail, or how to power through adversity and difficulty phases in your work Almost all academic programs (or just tradition) make it seem like the thesis question you answer is the entire goal of your career. I doubt it. As I said maybe for the rare few with a calling to be expert in <xyz tensor manifold number theory> etc. etc. it matters. But given that so few people reach the pinnacle of academia, for many, many others, these things are far more important outcomes that you keep with you in life. Maybe it's a similar logic to "it doesn't actually matter that much what particular app you're building, it's that you launch something and have the experience of doing that, in prep for your next thing".