alt Hacker NewsIncidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he way to the finish line to get that work to a publishable state.
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Oh man I feel that in my bones.
Any advice on how to mitigate this?
This, all while battling the increasingly heavy burden of regret towards having started a PhD in the first place.
The majority of PhD candidates deal with this because the point of a PhD is to prove you can to “normal science” [1] which boils down to “how do I make this system go from 1% observable to 1.001% observable” which is just a gate for being in the academic career field.
You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences.
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> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it
This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications
Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.