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This is terrible in my view: "As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I star
by cs702 12y ago
This is terrible in my view:
"As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy."
As a society, don't we want our young academics to be able to pursue their intellectual passions, no matter how obscure? A lot of original research is produced in areas that others have overlooked or considered unimportant. Do we really want a "citation market" to determine whether researchers can pursue their passions?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y agoInfluence matters. And academia attributes influence to merit. But the shape of influence is different from field to field and specialization to specialization. Moreover, it’s difficult to pinpoint a field and specialization where citation impact isn’t limited to “a handful of people.”
- noelwelsh 12y agoFor a number of reasons, no, we don't want PhD students to research whatever random topics pop into their head. For a start, PhD students don't know how to do research. That's one reason one does a PhD: to learn how to do research. That means listening to your supervisor and working on problems they suggest, at least in the early part of your PhD. I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere. Learning to formulate a useful research problem is a part of what you are taught. The second reason is that resources are finite. You don't get to piss around with other people's money anymore than other adults do.
- thekingofspain 12y agoBut at the same time, if the supervisor thinks your idea is good in all ways except for likely citation count, then why should you be prevented from researching that?
- ahomescu1 12y ago> I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere. Another way to look at it is that failure is a part of learning, and chasing those half-baked ideas can build experience (by finding out what doesn't work).