Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Student projects

How do you involve students in your research? You have to find a manageable chunk that you believe will lead to a clear and useful (publishable?) result in a reasonable length of time.  For a Ph.D. This needs to be doable in a couple years and it needs to be original research.  For an MSc perhaps you have only about a year.  For an undergrad project, just a few months.

I sure couldn't put students on my project looking for concepts with which to reconceptualize reality.  With that work you might get a single concept, like non-Markovian models, after a year or more of effort.  You can't just say, maybe we'll discover something interesting in a year or two.

As a consequence of capitalism business practices are being injected into every aspect of life. The idea of a masters thesis contract is a case in point.  Science is not business. One can not predict what will be discovered or when.

I suspect this all distorts the scope and direction of scientific research.

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