How to Choose a Thesis Topic (according to Joan Bolker)

Author of "Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day" (notice
that her opinion of the importance of topic choice contradicts the other
two authors):

* "Writing a dissertation is very much like being in a long-term
relationship: there are likely to be some very good times and some
perfectly dreadful ones, and it's a big help if you like what you've
chosen...If you choose your topic wholeheartedly, the writing process can
be a wonderful opportunity for pleasure"
* Choose a topic that's really going to matter to you: "follow your
curiosity, and, if you're lucky, your passion"
* Think and write about all the projects you've been involved with so
far, remember which were most fun. Do they have something in common?
"which sort of undertaking best suits how you like to work" Also what kind
of research you find most interesting to read.
* Find a model of a doable thesis for you
* Use advisor as a sounding board, especialyl about eventual job
search strategy in a topic
* One way to help choose a topic after you've done a fair bit of
groundwork: "Imagine finishing your dissertation and holding it in your
hand. Try naming it; play with titles that are clearly too outrageous, and
see which one most delights you." write them down
* Be writing every day all the way along, about ideas, what you've
read, problems, etc

How to Choose a Thesis Topic (according to David Steinberg)

From the author of ""How to complete and survive a doctoral dissertation".

* Excitement about the topic not that big of a factor in success,
since all dissertations run into similar sets of difficulties
* Essential questions:

Is it researchable?

* "One must be virtually certain that the data for the dissertation
will be available and accessible when the candidate comes around to the
collection phase of his project."

Especially timing is important, eg staff turnover rescinding access to a
population

Does it make a contribution to the field?

* "dissertation-as-too-little" or "dissertation-as-magnum-opus"
syndromes (magnus opus will come in 20 years)
* Just have to think & write about it, as well as talk to everyone

Is it original?

* What you should be looking for is daylight: after studying the
literature, and scope and ambition of other recent theses, "do I find a
hole, a gap, a missing link that my topic can contribute to plugging,
bridging or forging?"
* Again, talk to all faculty, like a travelling salesman
* Don't worry very much about being "scooped"
* Topics rarely come by chance for real: "topics almost always come
out of extensive soaking in the literature and prior research of one's
field, and are traceable consequences of that immersion"
* Expansion of a master's thesis from a dissertation not really an
easier option
* Never pick a topic with the assumption that a particular faculty
member is going to be there all the way through! It must stand on its own
* As much as possible, discuss dissertations that appeal to you with
their authors. They're almost always willing to share their time and
dissertation experience, esp within the first couple of years (often
noticeably more helpful than faculty)
* Be cautious of opportunities to use spin-off data - what if the
grant is cancelled or the faculty member leaves?

How to Choose a Thesis Topic (according to Robert L Peters)

It's that time now to return focus to my thesis. Hence it's helpful to get
a little perspective. Here's my notes from "Getting What You Came For: the
smart student's guide to earning a master's or phd"

---

* Don.t just worry about it, .ideas are generated by intellectual
cross-fertilization and the process of problem-solving. To find a topic
you must dive into research, discuss the ideas that interest you with as
many people as possible, and write about the subjects as much as you can..
* Start as soon as possible, you never know when a hint in a class etc
will come your way. Ask professors for suggestions, examine course
reading. Whenever you come across anything interesting ask yourself,
.could this be a dissertation?.
* PhD at least is original research which means to do at least one of:

1. uncover new facts or principles
2. suggest relationships that were previously unrecognized
3. challenge existing truths or assumptions
4. afford new insights into little-understood phenomena
5. suggest new interpretations of known facts that alter our view of
the world around us

* Think thesis question. A question intriguing enough to take a year
to answer. Begin with a major question, develop subordinate questions that
help you answer it, and plan and refine along the way research to answer
these questions.
* There are thousands upon thousands of thesis topics that will work
great for you, so it.s easy to find one if you search actively.
* Think of yourself as an apprentice - .At this stage, you aren.t a
great master who will find the secret of the universe. Originality does
not have to be spectacular, but can expand on existing research. People
hiring probably looking for dependable specialists who are well trained by
good mentors.
* If your advisor chooses the project, check it out by the criteria
below. But many advantages if you are working on the same overall endeavor
as your advisor

Don.t worry if nothing interest you

* .interest develops from immersion and activity. Luckily, people have
an amazing ability to become interested in almost anything once they are
working on it

Get perspective by reading theses and articles

* Use the best as models. Note aspects of. Go to other universities
theses.
* Start reading through journals in your field for possible topics

Phone research

* Speaking briefly to the top people in the area, asking to recommend
names. [Is this polite now? What is the best way to contact people in the
area?]

Start a research project

* best way to generate ideas is to be involved in an ongoing research
project

Use your professors

* Ask all of them

1. What are the hot areas in the firld?
2. What were the best theses written during the past few years?
3. Do they have projects associated with their research that could be
good theses?

Start a topic file

* Throw all ideas into one folder, then after a while start to have
folders for each possible topic as you flesh them out. Thoughts, notes
taken on discusssions with professors, relevant journal articles. Review a
few minutes each week so the search stays in the forefront of your mind.

Crteria for evaluating potential thesis topics
Does sufficient background information exists?

* do a lot of research on this (phone, computer)

Is the topic narrow enough?

* Be as specific as you can, easier to broaden a narrow topic

Has it been done already?
Is it tractable?

* Will it work in terms of the practicalities? Make sure every part is
possibile.
* Consult a statistical expert (power issues).
* How long will it take?
* Is it fundable? A good idea to do preliminary research to show that
it.s possible...
* Is it hot? find out this by talking to profs and reading current
journals.
* Avoid fields full of theoretical controversy.

Criteria that might affect your chances of getting a job.

1. Allow you to show off your background knowledge of the field
2. Focus on a narrow enough topic so that you can become the expert
3. Provide a springboard for future research

Start Writing immediately.

* "Writing is the best way to initiate, organize, and extend ideas."
* Start by doing a adetailed evalutation of each topic for

1. financial support
2. interest to you
3. extendability after completion
4. controversy
5. time to complete
6. "hotness"
7. advisor's enthusiasm
8. Closeness of topic to advisor's research
9. depth of existing research
10. duplication or uniqueness
11. narrow focus
12. tractability, including availability of research subjects or
materials, existence of preplanned experimental methods, degree of
methodological difficulty, and simiplicity of statistical design.

* For each topic under serious consideration, write an outline thesis
proposal: ask the major research questions, outline experimental or
reserach steps. This is good for showing to advisor and other for
comments, since it's specific.
* Live and breathe your topic to the point of being annoying. Talk to
everyone. Get immersed in planning. Draw in reserachers outside your own
university.

Maybe Events

When deciding whether you can do something on a given day, you have to
look at not just what you have to do, but what you might want to do that's
going on that day. This is tricky if you adopt, as I have, the GTD notion
that your calendar should be used only to block off time that you're
actually committed to, like for meetings and classes etc, thus defining
hard edges to the landscape of your flexible time (that is available to be
managed). I discovered creating "no time" calendar events on the days
where something is going on is really useful for this. I prefix these
"Maybe Events" with an "ii" (the easiest letters to enter on a palm
pilot). That's to distinguish them from other no time notes, like when I
have library books due. Now when I see a poster or get a facebook invite
to something coming up, like a concert or talk or party I'm not sure
about, I add it to that day as a maybe event, making sure to include the
address, time, and cost - all factors that could influence whether I
decide to go for it. To plan my weekday or weekend, I look at the entry
for that day, with all the maybe events stacked up at the top (7 for this
weekend alone) and sort it out.

Advice to a Young Scientist by Ron Weisman

I recently benefitted from the best "how to be a scientist" talk I've
heard since I hit graduate school (and started trying to be a scientist),
from the colourful, distinguished animal behaviour researcher Ron Weisman,
who I'd met before but never had much contact with. The advice that
follows is very specific to science, and some of it only applicable within
psych. To start, here are my notes and key excerpts from the paper he
published on the subject,

Weisman, R. G. (2008). Advice to young behavioral and cognitive
scientists. Behavioural Processes, 77(2), 142-148.

(he's working on a book)

- The most desirable approach is to begin with extensive observation of a
behavior in nature, move ahead to laboratory research, and then return to
nature to ensure that you have it right.
- My advice is to use as many tools as necessary to discover and explore
nature's secrets. [but think collaborators]
-You should not design your observations and experiments to test only one
hypothesis at a time. You should be testing as many alternative hypotheses
as there are ways for your experiments to come out. Think ahead about what
an experiment's possible outcomes might mean. If an experiment has only
two possible outcomes, one that renders it interesting and publishable and
one that renders it problematic and unpublishable, you have not designed a
good experiment. Anticipate the possible outcomes of an experiment and
tinker with the design until each of at least three possible outcomes has
a distinct and orderly explanation.
- Reviewers like to ask direct questions, such as, "Why did you do your
study in the way you describe?" For example, if your groups differed in
both pretreatment and treatment phases, a reviewer is very likely to ask
why you attribute the effect to the treatment phase. Reviewers also like
to ask about alternative explanations of your results. At the design
stage, you need to consider and sketch out possible outcomes so that you
can anticipate even an astute reviewer's alternative hypotheses about your
results. To conduct first-class research, you must consider and handle all
or at least most of the reviewers' possible questions well before
conducting the research.
- If you have waited eight or more weeks, you need to write the editor
politely requesting an action letter. Some authors have waited a year or
even two - don't join them. After 12 weeks, inform the first editor that
you are withdrawing your manuscript and submit your article to a second
journal.
- Once you have the editor's action letter and the reviews, read them
quickly, then put them away for a couple of days to let the heat go out of
them. No one likes criticism, and reviewers are critics, so the heat you
feel is unavoidable. However, don't wait more than a couple of days to get
back to your article as you have a lot of time and sweat in the
submission. The revision should be the highest priority item on your list.
Get the article and the reviews back out on your desk and begin to
organize the reviewers' comments under the topics the editor asked about.
Print out copies of the action letter and reviews, and work from the
copies to make an outline of your revisions and your cover letter for the
editor.
- Respond to reviewers' comments incisively and succinctly....Try to
answer in just a few words or at most in a sentence tucked into the
paragraph from which the comments arise. Beware of protesting too much:
never insert a paragraph, or worse yet an entire page, into an article to
answer a reviewer's comment. Sometimes it is best to paraphrase a
reviewer's comment, then either agree that it is an issue for further
research or point out how your research has already handled it - all this
in a line or two. If you must directly disagree with a reviewer, make it
as tactful and convincing as possible. Editors are rightfully biased in favor
of their reviewers. Bury your disagreements with reviewers deep in the
cover letter well after many instances of willing change.
- Every resubmitted article needs a cover letter; it should be highly
organized, carefully written, and keyed directly to the text of the
article by page and line number.
- Never make uninvited changes to your article
- You must be prepared to handle objections and I counsel you again to
give in as often as possible.

And some non-overlapping notes from the talk he gave, unfortunately not
capturing any of his very entertaining delivery. Love his approach to
drafting papers!

- Success in science requires a combination of luck and fire in the belly.
(if you can do a whole experiment without once looking at your data, you
might not have the fire)
- Not only must you have luck, but you must know when you've been lucky.
- Causation questions:
Proximate - mechanism
Phylogeny
Ontogeny
Ultimate - functional adaptation
You should be constantly thinking about all of them.
- Don't compare everything with everything. Base tests on the designs,
otherwise lose power.
- Stats secrets: if unequal variance, you can do two separate analyses. If
you can get invariance of p values over tranformations (e.g. to rank
order) you don't need normality.
- In-school proposals are for chumps and robots (robotic committees). Do
the shittiest job possible. The person who knows what to do well enough to
write a well-detailed proposal has already done the research. Proposals
for money are a different matter.
- Positive controls are critical: they let you falsify.
- Get and keep your participants' attention: prompts, rewards, whatever.
- How to write a paper: in this order: 1) methods, 2) figures, 3) results
to explain the figures or table, also at least outline the discussion. 4)
Intro (never use proposal intro) 5) finish discussion. Then revise the
whole article with linking and concluding sentences.
- Stick questions and summaries about your results in another file on
another monitor as you write, which becomes the discussion.
- Intro prepares the reader for the methods, results and discussion.
Prepare the reader all the way along for the conclusion.
- The writing scientists do is like brick laying, it's not like carving
marble.
- Memorize about 20 pages of Strunk & White.
- Make strong claims (not "it seems") - you will still get cited even if
you're wrong.
- Suck up to editors and reviewers at meetings and elsewhere. Helps if
they can put a smiling face to a name
- Pick a journal that publishes work like what you've done. Also pay
attention to impact factor. If rejected, try sending it to a better
journal.
- You must respond quickly and forcefully to the invitation to revise and
resubmit. Don't wait more than a couple of days to get back to your
article. Top priority.
- Revise & resubmit means they'll porbably take it.
- Cover letter to editor: "Reviewer 1 asked us to relate our work to
Jones's 2008 article, we now do so on line xx, page xx." Nothing more.
- Write a thesis as 3 or 4 papers stapled together.
- For postdoc, pick the best universities and the best supervisors, in
that order (for name recognition). Begin early and suck up big time. Write
professors directly and ask about their work. But think through your
questions and keep them simple. Get your supervisor to help. Remember:
it's impossible to overflatter academics.
- You go where the good job is (even the gates of hell)
- When you're hired, always bargain for more money.

How to Memorize a Poem

Last year, just a little too late for the fall, I took up the task of
memorizing John Keats To Autumn. Why? I don't know. But I love the poem,
and I love having it memorized. Now I am endeavoring to learn a turgid
piece of prose for the Andrina McCulloch Public Speaking Competition, and
I am reminded of some of what I learned in that process. Here's some steps
and principles that were very effective for my brain:

- First, break it into chunks to learn separately, by general topic or
gist. I copied the poem into a word file, and added a double paragraph
break every time I felt a slight change of topic. This could happen after
several lines, or in the middle of a line.

- Next, make sure you understand the literal meaning of every word, and
every sentence, in the text. This gave me lots of unexpected rewards for
To Autumn, and made me realize I hadn't ever listened to it that closely.
For instance the line "where small gnats mourn among the river sallows", I
realized I had mentally interpolated "river shallows", like the shallow,
muddy part of the river. When in fact "sallow" is an old word for willow
tree! That makes a totally different image, which I find prettier.

- Beyond just the literal meaning, strive to get a vivid, specific mental
image of what each part is referring too. Google images is really useful
to this. For instance "barred clouds":
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2368/2327983768_194f6c7692.jpg?v=0
and until I found an image, I couldn't picture fruit hanging on "vines
that round the thatch-eves run" Of course it doesn't need to be an
accurate image, in fact it's probably better if it's an absurd one. The
important thing is to make a decision about what it means. I even drew a
little map for the second verse, deciding where I thought the granary was,
the half-reaped furrow, the brook, and the cider press. It should be an
extremely clear and complete picture, as striking as
possible, and accounting for every single non-abstract noun. Think not
just vision, but sound, touch, taste, and smell. I really don't take the time
to form mental images while I'm reading usually, but it's so
important for remembering.

- The whole basis of my learning it was to assume that no word was there
by accident, each word was absolutely essential and changed the meaning a
lot. So that played a part in the images I constructed. I tried to
exaggerate it so that every adjective and verb choice would seem even more
necessary, like "to swell the gourd", I pictured a squash inflating like a
balloon. (it reminds me a bit of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote":
this approach to memorization is almost like setting you up to feel like
you are writing the poem yourself from scratch, and each word that comes
next is just the most obvious to capture your meaning) Try to get yourself
into the emotional headspace of the poem at each point, and greatly
exaggerate that too.

- Beside every chunk I wrote a couple of words trying to capture what that
part was about. For instance "sunset clouds" beside the chunk "where
barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day and touch the stubble plains with
rosy hue". The idea is to always be adding more and more funky structure
and meaning to the poem.

- If you have trouble remembering the order of the chunks, the ancient
"method of loci" works amazingly well. I know because I used it to
memorize the order of the 10 verses in bob dylan's desolation row. You
take your route to school, or some other route you know incredibly well,
and you attach each chunk subsequently to a landmark along that route.
While I was learning Desolation Row I literally taped verses to trees,
lampposts, and garbage cans. Then you can mentally trace the route, and it
will give you the order with perfect ease and certainty. It's even easy to
recite the chunks backwards: just mentally walk the route in reverse!

- Finally, there doesn't seem to be any substitute for drilling: going as
far as you can, or as good as you can, before referencing the source paper
again. After awhile I could drill myself without the piece of paper, just
saying it to myself, out loud or silently.

It takes a surprisingly long time to get every word right, but it's not
particularly hard work, and it's already brought me a lot of pleasure.
Once in a while I'll just recite it to myself while I'm washing my face or
riding my bike, like a mantra, enjoying making the mouth-shapes for the
words. I'm glad I have it this autumn, and hope I didn't learn it too old
to not have it for every autumn from now on.