Presumably, you first need to learn what is currently known about a particular field. How narrow does that have to be? Do you then go about trying to figure out how to solve or study unresolved questions, or do you have to invent, or at least find, the question as well? What does your advisor do?
Thanks,
Rob
(Not considering a Ph.D.)
You’ll need to clarify the thread title question.
Mods, it’s supposed to be “How does one get the idea for a PhD?”
Thanks,
Rob
When I applied to grad school, I visited the department of interest and spent some time talking to several profs who were involved in an area of research I was interested in. I found out what the hot topics of interest were in that area, and who had (or would have) funding available. In the end there was one prof who had funding, and he had a particular project in mind, and he invited me aboard to work on it, so there ya go.
Ah, I think you mean the idea for a Ph.D. dissertation, yes?
A doctoral program usually begins with course work. The general idea is that you have to develop a good understanding of the discipline as a whole and a very good understanding of two or more subfields or areas of specialization within the field. This means understanding key issues and debates, different arguments with respect to big questions, methodologies, etc. This all gets evaluated in comprehensive exams.
The idea for a dissertation usually comes out of some set of questions you’ve explored through course work or prior research. The question can be quite narrow but it needs to connect to some broader set of debates in the literature. Advisors and mentors can be of huge help here.
Science works a bit differently because doctoral students are doing research in someone else’s lab.
D18, PhD
For a lot of people, the advisor gives the candidate the topic. The advisor has a grant or an ongoing topic of interest. If you want to work for that prof, you work on that problem. This results in a lot of miserable students who don’t enjoy their work, spend years doing it, and often even quit.
I was fairly lucky in that my advisor didn’t care what I did as long as I was producing publishable stuff. I could have stayed a PhD candidate for a couple more years if I wanted to but given a choice between the poor wages, etc. of being a student vs. getting a tenure track position, guess what I did.
Most of my ideas came from seeing other people’s solutions and doing better in some way. (This is Computer Science, btw.) So, faster, simpler, etc. But also some were extensions. Solving harder versions of the problem or some such.
It helps to have a good “flow” of preliminary versions of papers coming by. A well-connected prof helps in this way. You see something very few others have seen and notice that something is wrong/too complicated/not very efficient and come up with a better way.
Later, as a prof, I sometimes “invented” a new problem that I thought had interesting applications and worked on that. This isn’t something most PhD candidates are expected to do.
An example: While working out a solution to a problem with a friend, I noticed that the method used was quite similar to the solution to a problem I had come up with the year before. I suggested that this might be a good, general technique. My friend “got it” and helped generalize it. We then spent a weekend writing it up for a conference with a deadline coming up, submitted it, and we got a nice paper out of it that got a lot of cites.
I entered a molecular biology graduate program where first year students do several rotations in different labs that are willing and able to take new students. The general goal of each rotation is to get acquainted with the research topics and methods available in a lab, as well as to figure out whether you can get along with an advisor for many years.
At the end of the first year, students join a lab. In the second year, students figure out a thesis topic. In my field this involves equal parts preliminary experiments and diving into the literature and all of the previous work the lab has done. At this point, possible thesis topics are limited to something related to the lab’s previous work. That’s not as limiting as it sounds though, since every time a question is answered, several new questions (and possible thesis topics) open up.
At the end of the second year, students write and defend a formal research proposal. The advisor (usually) helps a lot with the proposal, particularly with the overall strategy. Ideally you want to come up with a set of reasonable experiments where negative results don’t lead to a dead end. You don’t want to have nothing left to do after disproving your favorite hypothesis…
Generally in math the advisor supplies one or more questions for the student to work on. Often the advisor has actually solved it but not written it up; that’s really the only way to know that the problem is doable. In fact, my late colleague used to say that a PhD thesis is a paper of the advisor’s written under adverse circumstances. On at least one occasion, he commented (about an especially weak student) that he didn’t mind writing her thesis, but he minded having to explain it to her. I never had student that weak. In the case of my weakest student, I had an independent reason for believing the result true and a clear line to proving it. I explained that to him and he followed that line and, in fact, did a superb job of following it up.
In my own case the topic came about as a result of an idiotic jump to an erroneous conclusion on my part. But the conclusion was true under a certain additonal hypothesis and that is what I eventually showed (in a few special cases in my thesis and in general five years later).
Having been enrolled as post-graduate student in several different disciplines (English literature, maths, and library science) (but not having got very far in any), I will say that it does depend a lot on the discipline. Finding a topic in history is a lot different from finding a topic in maths.
My friend just burst into a department meeting one day and declared:
I burning your dogma!
And from that point it was on.
Though he was a bit confrontational and had a flair for the dramatic.
well, I don’t know nuthin’ 'bout Phd topics.
But I do have a question:
When I graduated with my BA, at the ceremony there was a little booklet listing all the Phd degrees being awarded that day, including the thesis topic.
Many of the topics sounded wonderfully grand and complicated…full of incomprehensible technical terms and chemical names so that I couldn’t even guess what the thesis was about.
Others were in plain English.(For example, a thesis from the Geography department, on the legal regulation of hazardous waste dumps. )
But my favorite was from the department of Health ,Sport and Recreation:
Somebody wrote a Phd thesis entitled “the effects of basketball weight on basketball free throw shooting.”
Now, here’s my question: how does a Phd from the “basketball department” compare in to a , well… a *real * Phd? 
For example, how long did the literature search take him to research his theory of basketball? Did his faculty committee challenge his choice of topic when he made his first thesis proposal? etc
A joke that’s origins are lost in the mists of time. (I first saw it in rec.humour.funny)
Scene: It’s a fine sunny day in the forest, and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his typewriter.
Along comes a fox, out for a walk.
Fox: “What are you working on?”
Rabbit: “My thesis.”
Fox: “Hmmm. What’s it about?”
Rabbit: “Oh, I’m writing about how rabbits eat foxes.”
(incredulous pause)
Fox: “That’s ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don’t eat foxes.”
Rabbit: “Sure they do, and I can prove it. Come with me.”
They both disappear into the rabbit’s burrow. After a few minutes, the rabbit returns, alone, to his typewriter and resumes typing.
Soon, a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hardworking rabbit.
Wolf: “What’s that you’re writing?”
Rabbit: “I’m doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves.”
(loud guffaws)
Wolf: “You don’t expect to get such rubbish published, do you?”
Rabbit: “No problem. Do you want to see why?”
The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself, after a few minutes, and goes back to typing.
Scene: inside the rabbit’s burrow.
In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner, a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room, a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth.
(The End)
Moral:[ul]
[li]It doesn’t matter what you choose for a thesis subject.[/li][li] It doesn’t matter what you use for data.[/li][li] What does matter is who you have for a thesis advisor.[/li][/ul]
Was it this?
Note that that one isn’t a PhD, but an MA.
Nope…that link is from 1989. I graduated in 1982.
Looks like somebody should have done a more thorough literature search… 
Life sciences faculty here.
First of all, no matter how smart and knowledgeable the student is, it is expected that the PhD advisor is more knowledgeable in his/her own research field (otherwise the student should probably look for another lab). Therefore, the advisor should be better qualified than the student to define the PhD topic -in the student’s own interest.
In general, as a master student, you are not expected to have a knowledge of the field that would allow you to propose your own PhD topic. Furthermore, in life science, performing your PhD will often require expensive specialized equipment and consumable. This implies that (1) your PhD topic has to fit the specific research area of your lab and (2) it has to be a topic that your lab advisor is interested in investing the lab’s money in.
Most advisors are happy to find students that can think independently and contribute their own ideas to their research topic. But at the end of the day, defining the research topic is the advisor’s responsibility.
It’s often an iterative process. In computer science, it went something like this: After passing your qualifying exams, doing all the course work, participating in research for while, yada, yada, you come up with an idea and attempt to generate a thesis proposal. This means lots of literature review and generation of a fleshed out plan for attacking the problem. During this process, a number of things can go wrong. First, you might find out during your literature review that someone else has already solved the problem in such a way that you can’t reasonably differentiate your research. Or you could find out the problem just isn’t novel or interesting enough. Or your advisor could change his/her research direction in such a way that they’re not willing to support that particular research direction.
So, back to the beginning and start again. This is and was the most demoralizing part of the PhD process. When you’re doing coursework, you have a well-defined goal. And when you have a thesis proposal approved, you again have a well-defined goal (even if it’s hard to get there). But that fuzzy in-between phase where you’re looking for a topic? A fair number of candidates never make it past that point.
Fixed, and moved to IMHO, since the answers to this will vary.
IME with chemistry, there isn’t even really any thesis topic to figure out. Work on stuff that you have funds to work on. Publish papers. When you and your adviser are tired of each other, reformat there papers with large margins and tables of contents, and GTFO.
