Thursday, April 27, 2017

The research process



I naturally am a big picture person who learned during grad school to also have a more detail-oriented mode. I had not gotten to that point in my second year, and my advisor pointed out that I had this habit of working out the bigger picture and then would immediately jump to trying to prove something (though not necessarily the right something). For the next two years I had a post-it note on my computer with "Big -> medium -> details" on my monitor.

Eventually I didn't need the note any more, but the smooth transition between levels of research focus stayed present in my mind as I continued my PhD. The summer before my last year I took some time to work on an independent project. I had my initial ideas of what the big picture was, but discovered in working out the details that there were interesting high-level concepts which I would not have come up with without going through the math. I realized that research is not just a one-shot transition through the levels, but that ideally you may traverse the range of focus levels a number of times to finish a project.

Which brings us to the picture at the top from xkcd. I like the idea of the "research focus knob" because there is no way to get from the big picture to the details without going through the intermediary levels. More than that, I think it makes it clearer that your goal is not to just go in a straight line from big picture to the details, but instead to pick the right level of the research problem at every point in the project.

Thoughts or questions are welcome!