Choice of topic

Students find it difficult to determine and
focus in on a topic for their thesis project.

One of (student) research’s hardest tasks comes right at the beginning: picking a topic. This is not only a broadly shared anecdotal experience, it also echoed through the student research projects that informed this series of posts. Not only that there’s a plethora of topics that you might work on, but there are also deep and daunting lakes of knowledge for each one of them. It is easy to get spooked into picking the easy path when choosing a worthwhile topic – why set yourself up for a greater challenge than you might be able to master?

In The Student’s Research Companion, we discussed the choice of topics in the context of relevance. In our minds, useful research – and a great topical choice for a research project – needs to be relevant. Relevance always implies choosing an audience, understanding the problems it faces, and attempting to help solve (part of) one of those problems by adding to its understanding or providing guidance to its solution. Thus, the key to finding a worthwhile topic may have less to do with determining one’s own personal preference and more with a deduction which audiences seem attractive and sufficiently understood for the researcher to try to make a contribution. In other words: while each researcher selects their research topic, the value of this choice will be determined elsewhere. This is a central notion behind our understanding of researchers as “purposeful scientific entrepreneurs”. In a nutshell:

Instead of picking a topic, identify your audience,
understand their challenges, and try to define a contribution. 

A necessary and often overlooked first step toward this way of thinking and acting as a (student) researcher is the intuitive or learned conviction that one’s own work can actually amount to palpable contribution. This may or may not have been experienced during the academic program. But after experiencing years of single-purpose academic examinations, it is far from a certain and broadly shared conviction among graduates that academic work generates more than an exam outcome. This implies an extended understanding of the thesis project beyond that of merely being an exam. For better and for worse, passing an exam is a less ambitious goal than making a contribution. The all-important second step, however, is to carefully include the detailed consideration of one’s contribution: To which audience would one like to make a contribution? Which contribution seems necessary? Which one seems achievable? Finally: What might the process look like from conceptualizing via creating to delivering and activating this contribution? Of course, this goes beyond the demonstration of a research skill. But then again, the optimal goes beyond the passable. If the thesis is supposed to matter, students and supervisors will need to invest the additional effort to put on the transmission belt between the (student) researcher’s work and its place of application.

What do you recommend to students who are in the process of choosing and focusing their research topic? Is there a good remedy to alleviate the “fear of deep waters” many students seem to get when diving into the literature on their subjects for the first time?