Getting Inspired by a Research Topic

First off, I’m going to slow my roll a bit. When I started really blogging here waaaay back two weeks ago, I tried to post every weekday so that I could get in the habit of actually maintaining this thing. I’m happy to say I successfully got in the rhythm, but now it’s time to slow down a bit. Why? Because I’m all over the place, writing about tips for graduate students, news events, personal news, and even watermelons. But really, why am I slowing down? Because the semester started, and I have far less time that I used to.

In any event, here’s another post. I’ll try to make them quality posts since I’m doing them a bit less often (my goal is still 2-3 per week, though, which isn’t bad).

Today’s post is about how to find a good research topic. This applies mostly to grad students in the humanities and social sciences, not grad students in the natural sciences. The reason is that natural scientists tend to link into an established lab during their graduate careers, which kind of determines their topic.

Many grad students have an immense amount of pressure to find a topic for their dissertation as quickly as possible in their graduate career. This is partially true. The benefit of finding a topic early is that you can make your coursework and comprehensive exam studying very focused, which in turn makes the dissertation writing stage efficient. But the downside to latching onto a topic so soon into grad school is that you tend to get in the habit of selectively listening in classes and only deeming articles “important” in your head if they somehow apply to what you’re doing.

Still, it’s better to have a topic in mind early, so that you don’t pass your comprehensive exams and say to yourself, “Wow, what do I do now? I have to write a dissertation and don’t really know what I want to write about.” Here are some tips for finding that magical topic:

• Get outside your discipline. Interdisciplinary work is all the rage in academia these days, and for good reason. We’ve become so siloed in our system of graduate education that we struggle now with how to build bridges across disciplines to address real, complex social problems. So if you’re, say, a communication graduate student, be sure you’re reading a bit of the scholarly literature from public policy, or architecture, or sociology, or some other discipline. It’ll help you identify hot trends in other disciplines that may not have made it to your discipline yet, and you could position yourself as the one who bridges the gap with your own work. Also, don’t be shy about contacting folks in other disciplines to collaborate, to find out what the must-read articles in their discipline are, and to scope out potential supervisory committee members.
• Read the news. The most interesting research topics are the ones that somehow link into current events. This doesn’t mean you have to be studying phenomena as they unfold, though that’s a really exciting place to position yourself. But it does mean that if you choose an obscure historical or literary topic, you should make sure it has some relevance today. Oil spill in the Gulf? You can write about how press coverage today framed the story. OR, just as interesting – you could write about political responses to oil spills throughout history. Both make for an interesting research topic because they relate to something happening today.
• Monitor the popular press. Scholars should never only read scholarly work. As I said in the previous point, they should also keep an eye on the news. But beyond that, scholars should read a lot of magazine articles and blogs. There are at least four reasons for this: 1) you can stay up on the trends, similar to the way a news story does, except with even greater depth and feature coverage; 2) you can get a glimpse into a very complex or narrow topic through the accessible language of a magazine writer or blogger. This is important especially if, say, you’re interested in nanotechnology or something really technical and cutting edge but don’t exactly know how to sift through the dense scholarly literature yet; 3) you get the first analysis of a major issue. Scholarly literature takes at least a year to be published, but a good journalist or blogger can crank out some pretty good analysis of a topic in a matter of days. This means sometimes a magazine has the most cutting edge scholarly-ish analysis of a topic; and 4) popular press articles help you identify key figures and points of tension in a debate. Magazine articles, for instance, will feature commentary from interviews with opinion leaders and scholars on the topic at hand. This helps you identify important authors of key pieces of literature.
• Solve a problem. I’m of the opinion that research should have a purpose, and ideally that purpose is to improve the lives of the downtrodden or preserve the natural environment rather than to simply build more knowledge. The most interesting – and challenging, demanding, and complex – research topics are the ones that aim to tackle a real-world problem. Don’t just analyze a TV show because you think it’s an interesting, rich text. Analyze it because there are messages in the show that have some real bearing on people’s lives, and you’re going to do research on that show in order to intervene in the way that show bears on people’s lives. Do something that matters. You’ll end up sticking with your research topic long after you finish your Ph.D. You essentially ride your dissertation topic all the way to tenure. So try to make what you do matter in some way, so that you don’t feel uninterested in it in a matter of a few years, and so that you can say when you earn tenure somewhere that all the work you did (perhaps funded by taxpayers if you work at a public university) actually did something worthwhile in the world.

If you stitch these things together you can usually turn up some really great topics. Keep your eye out for interesting stories, emerging trends, new technologies, and hot topics in other disciplines. And above all, try to make what you do matter in some way by solving a real-world problem.

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