

Ask HN: My first attempt at research  - chunky1994

Hey HN,<p>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.<p>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?<p>Also, to anyone in a research/research-like position, how do you approach research problems?
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dmlorenzetti
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
Thank you! On a side note I'm a physics major, haha.

