The thing is that these supervisors tend to choose something that interests them. The topic tends to be related to their current research and in my experience. They’re getting worse and worse at selecting a PhD or thesis topic. They either choose a project that’s far too narrow or far too broad; they’re not very good at looking at Cross disciplinary stuff. That’s what I want to say so what you’ve got to do is choose your own research project with your supervisor. It’s important and the first thing you need to look at is novelty. Novelty. has been done before and is it new. Now, don’t overthink this. It doesn’t have to be amazing. It doesn’t have to change the world. It just has to be a little bit new.
Introduction :
We Know, There is no shortcut to just reading the literature. The current state of the field and coming up with your own questions and being like I wonder. So all of those things need to be considered. When choosing the novelty or looking at the novelty of your research question. The first thing I like to do is use semantic search. So, we head over to tools like this. We head over to elicit and we ask a research question and we see what’s come up. So if we’ve got a question in our mind like a barber good at dancing. We can go there and find the barber’s dancing abilities. Research has shown that certain dance moves can influence perception of dancing ability and that blah blah so there we are. You can see that further research is needed to determine if barbers are good at dancing. So, there is a research Gap. It’s not an important research Gap and no one wants it in the world but that’s how you do it. Another kind of tool that I can go over to is consensus and ask the same question or a similar question.
Latest Phd Research Topics :
Let’s see, if there we are so this is the sort of question. I’m interested in apparently and it’s this sort of search that you need to go through over and over again, start reading papers, review papers in your field, start looking at very specific questions to see. If they’ve been answered and then you’ll start to build up this kind of sixth sense as to what is new ? What is a novel ? What’s interesting ? and to be honest with you, these days a lot of the most novel and interesting questions are found at the interface of different fields. Which is why relying solely on your supervisor can be a bit dangerous, they like to stay in their own little box and they don’t like to go outside of it. I’ve seen it firsthand. So. that is how you do it. So, let’s have a look at something new. Yes unique contribution, yes research Gap, yes that’s what you first need to look at but that’s not the only thing you need to look at this arguably is more important there’s your transition.
The second thing to consider about a great research topic. Is it relevant ? does it matter ? who benefits from you answering ? This research question is one place we would like to go, when I’m unsure of like the current state of a field or if I just want to get a little bit of inspiration on what’s hot like a hot new topic because that’s what we really want is I head over to something like news or science alert. These are written by science journalists and journalists have a really great way of framing exciting topics and finding out.
What is new and interesting to the general population. I’m not saying this is the only way you should select a research topic but I like my research topic to be at least a little bit interesting to the general population. So, if I go to science alert for example and I type in bats then we can see okay what sort of stuff is being asked about bats and I can go here bats and humans are closer than ever and the RIS have never been the secret to avoid in the next pandemic. Okay, so now we’re looking at bats and pandemics. So that clearly was interesting to people during covid and then we got huge bats used to walk around New Zealand in for lims that’s interesting. I’ll open up about that so, this is where I can find interesting and relevant new research that the general public are arguably more interested in than something that’s really blue sky. Now I’m not saying that the blue sky research is not important. What I’m saying. This is a great way of finding out if something is relevant to the population at the moment and it is a really sort of nice way to find out.
If your research field is going to be valued and valued by people outside of Academia but also inside of Academia, money flows to where the hot topics are. That’s why you see all these researchers like trying to mold their Research into the latest thing, whether it’s 3D printed food, whether or not it’s flexible organic photo voltaics like it was years ago like that is. Why people shift topics like that Professor shift topics because they’re finding where the money is. If you find a Hot Topic that’s relevant and is easy to kind of answer the question. Why is it important and who does this benefit? The money starts flowing to you like a river. If you want longevity and research after your PhD or thesis, that is something very important to consider. The third thing that’s really important. Is it feasible ? A lot of the times PhD supervisors forget that you should actually think about doing this in two or three years. Because their career has been going for ages. They’re dinosaurs of the academic world. They don’t care about one or two years but you do because that’s all you really have to do. Your PhD now, you’ll think that I just said one or two years as like a slip up. I didn’t because there is so much failure in a PhD that about a year of any PhD is just failure going backwards trying things again. So, when you’re thinking about feasibility. You need to think, what kind of project can I do in 2 years ? That is really the feasibility marker because there’s so much failure. There’s so much wasted time and effort that if you were to only work on successful things during your PhD they’d probably only take about one and a half to 2 years. So, you need to really change that frame of reference and not say, what can I do in like 5 years or 3 years.
What can you do in 2 years or 3 years that is really the most important question that you’ve got to answer. So, Is it feasible in terms of the data that you can get access to are you accessing data or are you creating your own things ? If you’re creating your own data have you got access to the equipment and the expertise that you need. you’ve also got ethics approval is. It feasible to do your project with all of the paperwork that you have to go through consider that before you even start your research project and then also time don’t choose something that’s super narrow that you can do in like a weekend obviously that’s not a PhD or a thesis but don’t choose something that you think is going to take 10 years your research supervisor is working on stuff that takes 10 years and his PhD students are little tiny steps. Along the way, what little tiny step can you do in about two years that’s a good rule of thumb. own you shouldn’t come up with a research project on your own sat at the computer talk to people talk to your research supervisor talk to other people in the field talk to other uh PhD students.
I think success is having a career where you enjoy it so much that you almost feel guilty that people pay you to do it because, you are having so much fun every day.
How do we choose our PhD topic ?
Now, it’s it’s it’s a very important question uh but you will not be really happy with the answer but that’s the truth it’s pure coincidence in most of the cases or in majority of the cases I would say now if you just I don’t know about how things happen abroad right but even abroad I will give you some examples later in the video uh that even there how you choose your PhD, PhD topic or research topic or your dissertation topic is very coincidental. Now, it is very very rare that you’ll have a very small subset of area that you want to do research and what I mean by that is organic organic chemistry is a very broad field right but within organic chemistry. Let’s say you want to work on only carbin so that sort of interest is or that sort of exposure is very very rare at Master’s level. So, you would have a very Broad area that you want like let’s say you want to work in um organic chemistry or for me. If I particularly talk about I really wanted to work in the pharmaceutical industry in the domain of drug Discovery. I was really fascinated at during my Ms on how drug discover is done.
I was actually fascinated by a lot of things but you know majorly. I was fascinated by drug Discovery. So, within drug Discovery itself. If you think about the fields that you have you have crystallography. It is very difficult for you to choose, where you wanted to, where you want to or where you are going to fit in that drug Discovery area. So, I basically chose Medicinal Chemistry. I did my PhD in Medicinal Chemistry and then later I started developing more and more interest towards computational chemistry. Which is also somewhat implicated or is a very very important, you know domain of drug discovery for that matter even my supervisor. He was doing synthesis in Masters and then I think his supervisor left the Institute and then he had to choose a new supervisor and he got exposure to computational biology. So even, he did not have any idea about competitional biology till the time, he got exposed to it. He really liked it and then now, you know he’s doing really well in the field. He has a good name for himself. So, the fundamental point is that it is very very difficult really to have an idea of where you want to pursue a research. It is more or less coincidental. I know it’s something which is really
Hard to digest but that is true but yes, you can have a very broad idea of where you want to work and within and when you get exposed to that field. You know, you will get to know more and more. You’ll be more knowledgeable and then you’ll be able to wisely pick, what exactly you want to do, when let’s say you do post-doctoral studies. So, it’s not like, if you pick a topic within PhD that’s it you have to pursue that topic for rest of your life that’s not true. you can definitely diverge from that field but yes the foundations more or less remain the same, but for me personally I would say what I did in my PhD like in in medicine and chemistry. I am nowhere close to this. So, I completely diverged from what I did in my PhD but that is again something. Which is very rare and I really wanted to have a go at competition biology or competition Sciences in general. So, you can diverge but generally. You diverge within that broad area of research. So, once you have a broad area in mind. Let’s say, you start doing your PhD, you get exposed to more and more Fields.
PhD Research Topics examples :
If you feel that one field fascinates you more or let’s say has more opportunities compared to what you are doing in your PhD. You can definitely switch to that particular domain and I don’t get this question honestly. If you are a really passionate researcher, Yes, of course you need to sustain yourself and you need to you need to know that what are the opportunities that’s something. I would say that is something important that you really need to think about, what are the opportunities in that domain but it’s very difficult to predict that and you really can’t you know work in a field where, there are a lot of opportunities but you are not really interested in it. It just becomes really difficult. Specially, when I talk about research like for example let’s talk about the 2023 Nobel Prize. Which was given for mRNA vaccines right. Now mRNA up until what 2010, 2012 mRNA. If I talk about search on vaccines particularly mRNA vaccines till 2012 like nobody paid interest then in 2020 even in during after 2012 until covid happened nobody was really paying much interest to this mRNA vaccine and suddenly within 2 – 3 years, you know there was so much interest and then the 2023 Nobel Prize and that is pure coincidence would not have happened mRNA vaccines would not have give got that kind of a boost. What they got, it is very rare that you do not have opportunities for yourself.
So, have some Faith have some confidence on yourself like for example when Alpha fold came. Structural biologists will lose their job. You know but no any new technology. If you’re smart now, structural biologists are actually using Alpha fold to do or to address more important questions. So be adaptable and be flexible and to be very honest. I love research so much that even, if I do not really get to do research and Drug Discovery and let’s say I want I get to do research in some other field because of some constraints. I would love to do that and I really resonate with one. One of the quotes by one of the Noel orat in 2019. William kin, who was given the Nobel Prize in medicine.