In research, your job has three main parts:
Ideally, if you do step 3 well enough, other people can learn the same interesting thing in less time.
*Sometimes this ends up being the most interesting thing that you have funding to work on.
Start by figuring out your interests! There are lots of ways to do this, and you’ll need to figure out what works for you. You could…
While you are doing these things, try to pay attention to:
Some general advice for reading papers: don’t read more than you have to! If the title sounds boring, skip it. If the abstract is boring, skip it. Read the section titles and glance at the figures. Are they boring? Look for every excuse to stop reading early. If you can’t find any, and it really seems like you might still need to read the paper, only then should you read the paper.
And read lightly. Skip directly to the parts that seem most relevant to you. Read topic sentences first. Skim. If a section doesn’t make sense, skip it and return to it later (if you must). Don’t get lost in the details/math before you have a rough idea of the argument!
This part is super important and extremely personal. We tend to become more like the people we spend the most time with, and research can take quite a long time, so try to find someone who you respect and enjoy spending time with (and who feels the same way about you!).
Ideally it should be a good match in terms of both research fit and personality fit. Here are some questions you can ask to get a sense of each.
When you’re trying to decide, make a long list of people and browse through their recent papers. Or see if you can catch one of their talks. You shouldn’t have to read very much to start crossing off papers (and soon people) from your list. If you can’t find a paper or talk of theirs that interests you, move on!
Note: professors tend to have limited free time, so if you want to join a project in their lab, often it can be quicker to get a response from one of their grad students or postdocs.
A good project should be interesting, important, and possible. When you are just starting out, the “interesting” part will be the easiest to judge, but you may need help determine the others.
Assessing importance usually takes some time since you need to build up your sense of research “taste”. Citation count can sometimes be helpful, since it measures how far the work has spread. But keep in mind that sometimes papers arrive many years ahead of their time and great work can go underappreciated for a while. Excellent ideas may be waiting for you if you have the courage and patience to look where others would not.
Fortunately, for assessing “possibility”, there’s a major shortcut: you can always try reproducing other people’s work! Assuming they did their job right (see step 3 above), what they claim to have done should be totally possible. This is often a great way to get started, and can give you something in common to talk about if you already know you want to work with them.
Another good strategy for getting started is by helping run extra experiments on a project that someone else is already working on. As long as you find the work interesting, this can greatly reduce your uncertainty about importance and possibility!
Possibly!
You can increase the likelihood by providing the following information when you reach out:
The inspiration for this checklist (and most of the content) came from Aly Lidayan.