Choosing a thesis topic

[robot_hamster]

I am doing a thesis for my MS and I am having a very hard time narrowing something down. Maybe you guys could tell me how you figured it out? As I talked about in another thread, my adviser is not someone who has the same interests as I do. They are actually in a completely different department. I just feel so, well, stupid. I am taking a class that talks about how to write a research proposal and whatnot. Everyone else in the class seems to know exactly what they want to do. So far we have worked on what we would like our research questions to be. I struggled with this greatly and what I came up with seemed so broad. Everyone else seemed to have everything pinned down (we shared our stuff in class). Am I the only person who has felt like this? I guess it would help if I could get more opportunities to talk to people with similar interests, but this class is just moving so fast and it is very hard to get professors to talk to you for some reason. Is there any way I can explore these things on my own? The literature out there is so overwhelming, I can't imagine where to begin as far as sifting through it goes.

Edited October 21, 2010 by robot_hamster

[ScreamingHairyArmadillo]

I felt the very same way until about 3 days ago when I finally just picked something. I recommend getting your hands on some textbooks on your field so you can get the context of what you're reading in the literature. That was my problem anyway; a lot of the theory was just new.

Do just try to talk to professors with similar interests. Stop by their offices or drop them an email.

[Sarah S.]

Read everything you can that seems relevant; studies done in the general area you want to do studies, similar subjects...find out what's been done and what hasn't, and what interesting questions come out of that.

[robot_hamster]

Thanks for the advice. I have been trying to find stuff that is relevant to what I'm interested in. I guess my biggest problem is that I don't know what is and is not possible. My school does have a lot of resources, but my research might require me to do some traveling or obtaining data from other sources. Since I currently do not have any funding, I am afraid that my opinions are going to be limited.

[starmaker]

A tip for finding interesting research questions that are feasible:

Read recent papers and find some that interest you. Then, closely reread the "discussion" sections of those, where the authors talk about the limitations of their research and potential future directions for this line of research. You can come up with solid interesting topics that way. You can also look for limitations of their research that they DON'T discuss, and pick a topic that would address those.

Just make sure that nobody already took your idea. The first time I came up with my own research topic with no help from a prof or other research supervisor (using the method described above), I discovered after a month of good work on the topic that somebody had beaten me to it. I actually managed to get a new topic from applying the above method to the paper that scooped my original topic, and got a well-received conference poster out of it and an A in the class that this was the term project for, but it was a pain having to re-start everything, and if I'd done a better lit review in the first place I wouldn't have run into the problem.