Showing independence+hypercuriosity as a character trait?

[InquilineKea]

Is this a good thing to show or not? I'm a very heavy self-studier and I have all sorts of ideas/hypotheses for various problems in astronomy/planetary sciences/applied math. This might help when it comes to thesis research - I might be able to generate a wide number of ideas - and the professor might select which one of them is the most interesting to him. And self-studying is an extremely important skill (that many people still haven't fully developed by grad school) because you're really mostly on your own when it comes to learning the things that you need to learn for your thesis (and this applies for future research of any other type too).

But at the same time, your advisor wants you to work on their project and to stick to their project, even if it may not be the project that's most ideally suited to you. Of course, most people recognize that students generally do better jobs when they're researching something that they're genuinely interested in. But if you give people the impression that you're way too independent, then they might fear that you might not want to work on any of their projects.

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- Also, how would *extreme* curiosity and massive interdisciplinary knowledge come off as? I'm curious to an *extreme* - in fact - there probably isn't anyone in the nation who is more curious than I am (anyone who knows me actually sees that this isn't far from the truth, although some people are probably *a lot* better at keeping it to themselves) - although this curiosity could be sometimes counterproductive to research since curious people want to maximize d(knowledge)/dt, and many aspects of research aren't exactly ideal for maximizing d(knowledge)/dt, so a hypercurious person could end up as a risk since he may be perceived as being more likely to defect to another field (or more likely to waste endless hours of time reading Wikipedia articles and journal articles of completely unrelated fields). At the same time, though, I can channel much of this curiosity into domain-specific curiosity (aka astrophysics)

And with interdisciplinary knowledge, well, I'm going for a highly specific field - astrophysics. Now, some people certainly tout the benefits of how familarity with another intellectual framework can bring new (unexpected) insights to their field (for one thing, there are many statistical+mathematical techniques used heavily in other fields that aren't used as much as they could be for astrophysics - and people from other fields are often more likely to modify their assumptions/boundary value conditions - often in ways that people within the field wouldn't anticipate). And there is actually evidence from psychologists of science (Greg Feist's "Psychology of Science" and Dean Simonton's "Scientific Genius" and "Origins of Genius" - and Simonton's numerous research papers) showing that highly creative scientists are more likely than others to be familiar with many other different disciplines (I'm actually tempted to cite that in my SOP, but I'm pretty sure it will end up rubbing the wrong way)

But of course, not everyone thinks that way. Furthermore, this, again, makes people question whether or not I would be committed to stay in graduate school for 6-7 years (I very much am, although I probably do waste significantly more time [articles and textbooks of different fields] than the average student). I would have to convince them that I wouldn't carry on this habit in grad school as well (this is quite possible, since I'm content once I've convinced myself that I've gotten a well-rounded education in all the sciences, and I'm getting close to that point). I actually self-studied enough molecular biology and neurobiology to be able to take a graduate level neuro/biophysics course without any prior biology courses (although I did get 5 on AP Biology, which won't go on the transcript) - and now I have enough knowledge to regularly read psychopharmacology journals for fun (or in other words, I've reached the point where learning more would simply be stamp-collecting, which is basically enough to satisfy me in that field). And I've also self-studied huge portions of atmospheric science (enough to get through at least 2 textbooks). And even if people might not think of the knowledge as useful, some may still regard massive self-studying as a desirable "signal" of other more desirable characteristics.

Now, of course, the real question is - does anyone care? I, of course, realize, that in order to get ahead in academia, that I must pursue questions that are interesting to *other* people. That, of course, is something I'm willing to do. Having massive breadth makes it *a lot* easier to talk to people who aren't working in the same branch of astrophysics as you (you ask questions that are better-targeted, some of which may give them some unexpected insights). And in talking to them, I can get a good list of all the questions that people find interesting, and choose which of these questions I'm most willing to work on (this is more relevant after grad school than during grad school, of course).

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The main problem here, though, is that there is actually substantial evidence that hypercuriosity has hurt my transcript. (I do view it as more of a thing in the past, since I have medications for my ADD now, but others may not be convinced). At the same time, curiosity is often seen as the ideal *defining* virtue of scientists (you will rarely see unrestrained curiosity respected as much in any other discipline). But academia is much more than just a playground, and many people have their own different priorities/criteria.

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Of course, it could come out in the LORs. But I don't think many people mention curiosity in their LORs.

Edited January 27, 2011 by InquilineKea

[InquilineKea]

Okay, so curiosity isn't a trait to emphasize. That's for sure.

But what about my resourcefulness when I'm stuck? Some undergrads pretty much bail out on the professor when they get stuck - they just wait for the professor to explain things to them - meanwhile - I collect huge amounts of resources [including research papers that might have attacked the problem from another angle] so that I can try to solve the problem on my own before asking for help (professors don't have infinite time, so they can't bail out people all the time - although some people do bail out on postdocs/grad students they also work with). I'm not sure how big of a problem this is in grad school (certainly people will get stuck from time to time).

And I actually talked with a stanford undergrad about this - she said that professors at state universities were more patient and more willing to mentor undergrads than professors at private universities (she said that it was harder to get research at privates since professors weren't as willing to mentor undergrads who got stuck). I gave her the example that Caltech/MIT students have very high participation rates in research, but she said that it was because Caltech/MIT students all self-study so much over the summer.

Edited January 27, 2011 by InquilineKea

[MoJingly]

Wait.... what's the question?

Should you show curiosity and independence? Of course. As long as you can reel it in, edit yourself, and know when to focus. There's no reason put on a charade, but understand that it ultimately comes down to what you produce and how succinctly you can produce it.

[NewNewb]

It really depends on the students and the professors. But generally speaking, they are good traits. You just need to be to express it carefully to not come around in a wrong way.

I am not familiar with astronomy research but can say a thing or two about applied math. Undergraduate students usually do not have good ideas for research. Their ideas are:

1) things that have already been done.

2) things that are ridiculously impossible or not well-defined enough to be done. Being able to tell and appreciate a hard problem is not easy.

3) things that are trivial. Remember that algebraic manipulation, a.k.a doing problems in some new interesting ways, is nice but usually not research worthy (yet still a nice thing to show in class).

So it is usually more productive to follow the research problems that the professors have. While there are exceptions from time to time, attempts to come across as hyper-curious without sufficient training in the subject of matter usually backfire as naiveness, arrogance and lack of seriousness. Knowing how to ask good answers, my definition of curiosity, is a very desirable trait but only comes with adequate background in the subject of matter and research experience.

Edited January 27, 2011 by NewNewb

[InquilineKea]

Ah - good points about undergrad research ideas. Thanks for all the advice - I really appreciate it all so far.