I think the really revealing thing is how you react to this revelation: I'm pretty sure that if you're REALLY steeped in academia you're supposed to say "yeah ... and ... ?"
I have this discussion with one of my labmates often. He argues that the purpose of a PhD is 'gathering human capital' or knowledge, about research so that you can do something useful/practical later. I argue that if I thought what I was doing was a complete waste of time (ie not practical at all) I'd go do something else, but am starting to suspect that the bulwarks of that statement are a bit shaky. On the upside, most things in science are interesting/useful, if you just know where to look.
Though I agree there is an important distinction between "not practical" and "not feasible." Though maybe less so than you would think/hope.
I'm not sure how people define practical or feasible, but I think a lot of PhDs are solutions looking for problems. For example, when I talk with a lot of PhDs in signal processing, the types of signals that they're working with aren't very important in the real world. When you ask a student about this, (s)he will normally say these types of signals aren't important yet, but could be in the future. Furthermore, highly used signal processing areas, like image processing, are extremely mature and the cost of even a small change to a standard is enormous.
It looks like I've happened upon a similar situation, where the portion of the system I'm working with is not the research bottleneck. When someone actually gets a good idea of the research bottleneck, the solution could drastically change. The returns are so marginal on this portion of the system that I'm not convinced it is worth the time right now.
Hah. It's a little the same with my project- I'm working on a project that is similar to one pursued with a previous graduate student, and I think by all accounts the results I (eventually) obtain will be similar to the results already garnered. So I am looking for other aspects which might make it more interesting- and those things are there, they're just not obvious. Or even obviously helpful, and certainly not world-changing- but I'm still coming to grips with that. Because of course I came to grad school because I wanted to change the world. If I look at that more pessimistically, am I letting myself down? heh...
Maybe a better way to phrase the question would have been "by not practical", do you mean "not feasible" or "not useful"? (Sounds like it's the latter. Could be worse. :/)
As a public school teacher I could talk until I was blue in the face regarding pure science. A lot of things can be understood and explored if one knows about 5 major scientific principles intimately. Try to tell that to administration who wants stuff put into kids so they can later color in the right dots on a state test. The broad concepts are important. The practical later fills itself in. Is this at all related to your dilemma? If so then the problem starts at a very early age.
The main criteria for a PhD are "substantial" and "original", and practicality isn't critical. While the central idea was extremely novel (and feasible), I think it was just that - novel, and not ever going to be useful. I would prefer to work with something that might at least be useful.
I think there are a lot more surprises with a science PhD than an engineering one - i.e. scientists research a topic, and it isn't clear what is actually going on. Engineers tend to care about how to create what is going on, rather than create a model which explains the black box of an unknown system. At least with the engineering work I've since, the central hypotheses are more along the lines of "Device/technique X can perform application A, which could never be done before as far as we know," or "Device/technique X can be used to perform application A more efficiently than device/technique Y by Z% when the two are compared with metric M."
11 comments:
Oh dear. Take some time off to think, it might help. Things can be pretty crazy.
I think the really revealing thing is how you react to this revelation: I'm pretty sure that if you're REALLY steeped in academia you're supposed to say "yeah ... and ... ?"
("not helpful" is my specialty.)
wait, do you mean "not practical" or "not feasible"?
isn't most PhD work not practical? how else would you prove that you are prepared to teach college students unnecessary stuff??
wait...that came off a little more bitter than I meant it to...
but i still agree with the sentiment...oh well, I guess I'm bitter!
I have this discussion with one of my labmates often. He argues that the purpose of a PhD is 'gathering human capital' or knowledge, about research so that you can do something useful/practical later. I argue that if I thought what I was doing was a complete waste of time (ie not practical at all) I'd go do something else, but am starting to suspect that the bulwarks of that statement are a bit shaky. On the upside, most things in science are interesting/useful, if you just know where to look.
Though I agree there is an important distinction between "not practical" and "not feasible." Though maybe less so than you would think/hope.
I'm not sure how people define practical or feasible, but I think a lot of PhDs are solutions looking for problems. For example, when I talk with a lot of PhDs in signal processing, the types of signals that they're working with aren't very important in the real world. When you ask a student about this, (s)he will normally say these types of signals aren't important yet, but could be in the future. Furthermore, highly used signal processing areas, like image processing, are extremely mature and the cost of even a small change to a standard is enormous.
It looks like I've happened upon a similar situation, where the portion of the system I'm working with is not the research bottleneck. When someone actually gets a good idea of the research bottleneck, the solution could drastically change. The returns are so marginal on this portion of the system that I'm not convinced it is worth the time right now.
Hah. It's a little the same with my project- I'm working on a project that is similar to one pursued with a previous graduate student, and I think by all accounts the results I (eventually) obtain will be similar to the results already garnered. So I am looking for other aspects which might make it more interesting- and those things are there, they're just not obvious. Or even obviously helpful, and certainly not world-changing- but I'm still coming to grips with that. Because of course I came to grad school because I wanted to change the world. If I look at that more pessimistically, am I letting myself down? heh...
Maybe a better way to phrase the question would have been "by not practical", do you mean "not feasible" or "not useful"? (Sounds like it's the latter. Could be worse. :/)
As a public school teacher I could talk until I was blue in the face regarding pure science. A lot of things can be understood and explored if one knows about 5 major scientific principles intimately. Try to tell that to administration who wants stuff put into kids so they can later color in the right dots on a state test.
The broad concepts are important. The practical later fills itself in. Is this at all related to your dilemma? If so then the problem starts at a very early age.
The main criteria for a PhD are "substantial" and "original", and practicality isn't critical. While the central idea was extremely novel (and feasible), I think it was just that - novel, and not ever going to be useful. I would prefer to work with something that might at least be useful.
I think there are a lot more surprises with a science PhD than an engineering one - i.e. scientists research a topic, and it isn't clear what is actually going on. Engineers tend to care about how to create what is going on, rather than create a model which explains the black box of an unknown system. At least with the engineering work I've since, the central hypotheses are more along the lines of "Device/technique X can perform application A, which could never be done before as far as we know," or "Device/technique X can be used to perform application A more efficiently than device/technique Y by Z% when the two are compared with metric M."
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