# How does one get the idea for a PhD?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-one-get-the-idea-for-a-phd/729541>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [August 31, 2015, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-one-get-the-idea-for-a-phd/729541 "2015-08-31T20:40:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [September 1, 2015, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-one-get-the-idea-for-a-phd/729541/21 "2015-09-01T17:25:24Z")

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Some people, like me, come up with millions of ideas. Some people don’t.

I learned about my detailed area my senior year of college, got to work on it in general in grad school, and as I learned more came up with an idea which I finally did. I basically told my adviser what I was going to do - since it was in the area of his grant, that was fine.  
Those without ideas get told what to do, often something promised in a grant proposal (or going to be promised in the next grant proposal.) Anyone familiar with the area should be able to come up with lots of topics - if this is a problem it is an indicator that the interesting work in the area has been done already and it is time to look elsewhere.

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**Author:** ![mcgato](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac8455/32.png) [@mcgato](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mcgato)\
**Post date:** [September 1, 2015, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-one-get-the-idea-for-a-phd/729541/22 "2015-09-01T17:46:31Z")

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Some that I am aware of:  
Physics: as an undergrad, I had a job as a lab assistant. Most of my year was spent on a project that led to a PhD for the grad student doing a lot of the work, under the supervision of a professor. Someone at another school had claimed to have detected a previously undetected particle (magnetic monopole), and other groups were trying to either verify or debunk the claim. That guy has a very nice job at the Large Hadron Collider at this time, though he is also officially part of a US university faculty.

Human Performance (or something): high school friend did a dissertation dealing with something like visual cues used for long jumping. Not sure where he got the idea, but he is currently a professor in the Kinesiology and Health department at a US university. His area is Exercise Science. I don’t think he ever gets kidded about his PhD.

Statistics: I found my topic as part of a survey class in grad school. Our only project was to do a literature review of some area of our choice related to the general topic of the class. After doing a small lit review, I came up with an idea that looked like it could be defended, and the prof agreed. I just had to do more lit review, and work on the actual dissertation. I think that I got lucky in finding something like that. I currently work in big pharma R&D.

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