Ask HN: My first attempt at research

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5800988

by chunky1994 • 13 years ago

2 2 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey HN,

I'm an undergrad and I just recently started a position as a research intern, in an area in which I have no experience, let alone expertise.

I've read the related research material, and have been presented with the problem, and I'm unsure about how to proceed. Apart from thinking about how t approach/arrive at a solution to the problem, do you men/women have any advice?

Also, to anyone in a research/research-like position, how do you approach research problems?

dmlorenzetti• 13 years ago

As an undergraduate, you may not fall prey to this particular problem, but where I work we have a lot of postdocs, and I often see them falling into ruts because they have a student mind-set of "I need to solve this problem entirely independently" rather than a company mindset of "my job is to deliver a solution to this problem."

Mostly this manifests as a reluctance to seek out advice from people who know the problem space well. It can also show up as a dedication to a particular self-brewed approach, despite strong hints from experts that some other approach probably would work better.

To turn that into direct advice, try to identify a mentor at work-- your boss may be one, but you really want a technical mentor-- who can spare you an hour a week or so to bounce ideas off of, and to give you an occasional nudge when you go astray (which you will). And then respect that mentor's time, by weighing his or her advice carefully before you reject it.

Another thing I've noticed is that physicists are very fast at making inroads on problems they've never encountered before. I'm not a physicist, so I can only speculate about why, but in general I think it relates both to their broad background training, and to an approach that emphasizes estimation as part of the analysis. I feel like physicists are far less likely than others to start off chasing a solution that's likely to tackle only 1% of the problem.

To turn that into direct advice, before you plunge off on some tack that you find interesting, try to perceive the outline to the answer of how this approach is going to solve the problem, or a substantial amount of your problem. Obviously you need time to build up your technical background, but maybe thinking in these terms will help you not only find the most likely research approach, but also figure out where you personally want to invest your time acquiring expertise.

Finally, the fact that you posted your question to HN implies your problem space is programming-related. Another side of the student/employee dichotomy is that students are much less likely to consider IP issues when scavenging code. Make sure you find out what your company guidelines are regarding provenance of any source code you use, and make sure you document where you got every last scrap of code you don't write yourself.

chunky1994• 13 years ago

Thank you! On a side note I'm a physics major, haha.

Ask HN: My first attempt at research

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