My brain hurts trying to decide...

[ravyn]

I feel that I might be going a little bit crazy trying to decide on what I want my research topic to be about, and I really need some kind of input from you guys. I am asking you guys first before I go to my department... because I have a tendency to not understand my own thoughts ...so I don't want my department to have to slug through this all the way. And hopefully this benefits others too.

I am in my 4 - 5th week of my PhD program. I have to think of a project to do for my first year project, and I do have ideas (of course, definitely not well thought out ...but ideas despite how horrendously horrible they are xD). I think it would be cool to work on statistical learning in word learning; I like how it relates to social contexts ...so how does word learning differ at home vs school (actually, I thought of this on the spot just now). Executive function as it relates to semantic processing sounds great. And definitely theory of mind is a cool idea. I am sure that there are lots of cool *cough*better*cough* ideas out there, but so far, I am not having any "jump out of bed to read read read read" great ideas. Maybe I am being too hard on myself, but I want to be more enthusiastic than I am now.

On top of that, I am in a place, physically, where I am really changing as a thinking human being. A year ago, I thought I wanted whatever I did in life to have direct clinical implications in almost any capacity and almost only that. In fact, I thought I should have applied to clinical psychology programs. Back in July, I hung out with a dissertation level PhD student getting ice cream. She had let me know that if she knew me earlier, she would have advised me to apply to grad programs in clinical psych. Now, it's September. And although clinical aspects of psychology of various sorts is interesting (and in my field directly, they also encourage you to think about clinical applications), I am glad that I do not have to limit my research to the clinic. Focusing my research on clinical aspects of the field is a "small-minded" approach (I don't mean that it's close-minded ...it just seems ...small to me, like I could be doing more). In fact, I think I MIGHT have an interest in sociolinguistics. We had a reading sample about sociolinguistics last week (socioeconomic status and phonology), and I really liked it. It's not something I would have EVER imagined myself to be interested in (although that's sort of a lie ...but to make this thread simple, we'll leave it at that). I have always been a scientist because that is what I've always been surrounded by in almost all aspects of my life (you know... the heavy science like DNA and genes and stuff), because that's what I was pushed to do by others (I know, I will have to come to know that I am my own person ...DNA is cool though ...from a neurospsychology aspect!) ...I never knew that I would be interested in something outside of science. In fact, I am jealous of my new friends I made (also a PhD program at my school) who get to look at cultural aspects of life instead "can you distinguish this sound from this one?" <-- I am taking speech perception this semester lol; it's an alright class.

Do you see my dilemma? I am not sure which direction my heart and brain feels comfortable going and I'd like to talk it out. It's bad to be all over the place, right?!!? Please and thank you

Edited September 25, 2015 by ravyn
just rechecking my wording. I like to show off my writing abilities (which isn't all that great) =P

[fuzzylogician]

First off, it's pretty common for people to refine and/or change their interests once they start grad school. It can often happen while/after taking courses in areas you had not been exposed to before, so this sounds perfectly normal. However, I think it would be useful if you stopped thinking of some of your new interests as "not science." That is sure to piss some people off, and beyond that it's just not a healthy way to think about your options. Not everything that doesn't look at DNA is "not science." And furthermore, regardless of how you define science two more important questions are what questions you want to ask, and what is the *best way* to go about answering them. I am willing to bet that if you want to study sociolinguistics, DNA just won't get you too far, but observation or large-scale surveys might.

Finding a research topic is a process. The ideas you spelled out above are not really research topics, they are more like areas of exploration that might lead to a topic. So I propose doing two things. First, choose one area and taking the next step -- namely start reading to try and identify a more contained problem. Keep in mind that this may take time; especially when you are new, you have a lot of literature to explore before you really know where your field stands on your question of interest. Through doing that, one of two things might happen. Either you'll discover that actually the details don't interest you much, or you'll discover that you need to read a whole bunch more before you can identify an actual question. Both of these things are normal. It takes some back and forth to really identify a hole that you can fill. (The big problem often is not identifying something that's missing, but making sure it's a manageable size that you can actually reasonably tackle and have results for!) After you've done some reading and are sure the area you chose is one where you'd like to read more, take that to your professor. You don't need to already have a topic selected, just an area. Come when you have some understanding of the questions that are asked there; when you can say "I read XYZ and though ABC was interesting." Ask the professor to suggest more in that area, or if you have specific thoughts about anything you read, bring them up and discuss them with the professor. The second thing you should do is expect things to change. The process will be non-linear. Some weeks you'll make lots of progress and others not. What you started out with with likely not be what you end up thinking is most interesting. The methodology you use might change. This is all to be expected. The important thing to get started is to just pick something and start going from there--not to get overwhelmed by the big picture, but just start digging in. 

[knp]

As someone whose thoughts are often very! scattered! one thing that has helped me is writing stuff out on paper, often several times. This started as a fits-and-starts habit of keeping a diary, but it's even more helpful for me for intellectual work. For some reason my thoughts come much clearer if I can't produce them quite so fast, made slower by the process of handwriting. Sometimes I write freeform, sometimes I write outlines. If I were in your situation, I might make a brainstorm-style list of "subjects I like" on four corners of a paper, and write pros and cons of each, to see if there are some common pros that might help clarify my thinking. This lets me produce better snapshots of my thoughts at any point, even as they change from doing further reading, and let me pursue further paths with a little better information about how I'm feeling.

Although if you decide to take an outline to show a professor of yours at some point, I recommend that you not do like I did that one time, and bring an outline that includes the bit "à is fucking complicated!" I might not have noticed, but my professor sure did.

[ravyn]

Thanks guys for responding!

@fuzzylogician  hard to here, but yeah. I really need to rethink things with a different mindset; it's just challenging right now. Still, you're very right. I need to take small steps and not focus solely on the big picture... I just need to pick something up and run even if I will eventually change direction. I am going to try to start that process of simply reading/digging WITHOUT overthinking it. I will start tomorrow, after my doctor's appointment.

@knp lol, I will try to NOT do that that last part =P But yeah, I like that advice. I just need to be honest with myself about my likes and dislikes, though.

[ravyn]

OK. I am sort of going to use this to help me develop my thoughts so I sound less like an idiot outside of the Internet after I receive your input.

So, one of my classes have been geared towards acoustics and speech perception, so I think I know FOR SURE that I want to stay away from that as a potential first year/second year/dissertation topic. So I now know that I am not interested in motor theory of speech or articulation or even how we hear specific speech sounds (although the idea of top-down processing is interesting ...how we inject our own knowledge into what we think we hear when certain sounds are missing) ...I always liked the idea of top-down processing in general. So I am thinking of using that topic for a class project. That or some other kind of cognitive processes (attention, inhibition or something) because I really do like those (I am just not allowed to work on my first year project for the in-class projects).

Anyway, I am also not interested in looking into the acoustics of speech sounds. Some of the papers we read really looked into that (are there acoustics invariants? does voice onset time vary between the languages? ...actually, I looked at voice-onset-time in p and b as a mini project a while back, but I am not interested in looking more into that, although it was cool at the time). looking into acoustic landmarks for phonemes that make up words also might not be my area of interest.

I know I don't care for speech perception in those with cochlear implants/hearing aids/hearing loss in general. I went to seminar related to auditory stuff (the talk was about pitch perception in people with cochlear implants). My long term interests don't lie there, it looks like.

I don't think I am all that interested in the phonemic levels of things (like how do people tell the difference between l and r or how do we GET them to produce the phonemes correctly)

So yeah. I still have more reading to do to identify what I would like to do ...so I won't stop reading about the topics I just mentioned (since the readings are for my classes lol), but I will need to add in my own readings to do on my free time to identify an area of interest. 

A person in my program shared a paper with me about Autistic kids reading body language because I started talking about theory of mind with the person (the person is taking a course in Autism). And another person did their dissertation on autism and scalars....ssssoooo. yeah. I will need to learn more about this stuff first before I say I found my true love. I mentioned theory of mind in one of my classes and the professor gave me a "X" sign with their fingers. The prof said it's a hot topic, but prof hates it (but then again, the prof is interested in auditory perception/audiology ...I don't think anyone in that field is interested in theory of mind). 

Another fear is that I hope the professors in my program can accommodate my interests. *is scared*

Anyway, talk to you all later. I gotta go home!! Please critique my ideas! I gotta learn to get better at accepting critiques and using them to improve. Oh and excuse my grammar/spelling mistakes. I am too lazy to fix them.