A talk to beginning graduate students. Why do you study? Role of research? What do graduate degrees signify? And a Magic Spell to help with (almost) everything... This is Part 1, Part 2 discusses Science and how to do it.

1. About your graduate studies, Part I:
Why we do research, and is there a
helpful Magic Spell?
PSU Surat Thani
Seppo Karrila, March 2015

2. What do I think you are interested in?
• Part I:
– Why do we study? What is the role of research?
– What is the big picture with graduate degrees?
What do they mean or signify?
– Practical advice to a graduate student? Is there a
Magic Spell to help out?
• Part II:
– What is Science?
– How can we keep making “scientific
contributions”?

3. Who am I?

4. Half the lies they tell about me
aren't true.
(Yogi Berra.)
• I have ‘always’ been in research, in
– a managed research facility serving an industry
consortium,
– academia with self-managed projects, teaching
– a large international corporation doing proprietary
research
• For more introduction, Google me

5. The future ain't what it used to be.
(Yogi Berra.)
• Technology changes are happening at an
exponential rate (Moore’s Law).
• What will be there in ten more years?

6. Exponential growth of research
(semi-log plot)
• Data from Medline
• Source of plot:
– http://larsjuhljensen.wordpress.com/2008/02/
• Implications:
– Splits to subfields
– Expertise gets old
quickly
– Learner must focus

7. Every form of
communications
technology is doubling
price-performance,
bandwidth, capacity every
12 months
7

8. 8Credit: Ray Kurtzweil, www.singularity.com

9. 9
Credit: Ray
Kurtzweil,
www.singularity.com

10. Educators’ dilemma
• If we don’t know what the world is like in
2020, how can we educate students to be
prepared for their duties until retirement
around 2065?
– Honestly, we can’t ! Today’s students must be
able to adapt to things we can’t predict.

11. Constant adaptation is a must!
Life-long
learning

12. Critical thinking
• Student detects:
–conflicting information
–selective information and censorship
–disputable assumptions
–confirmation bias
–answering the “wrong” question
–over ambitious claims

13. Simplification
• Removing repetition or redundancy
• Finding common patterns
• Labeling clusters with descriptive
names, creating new terms
• Unifying perspective, new viewpoint

14. Summarization
• Detecting what is essential and what
is “filler”
• Communicating clearly the essentials
• Empathy to audience
–What does the other person know?
–What do I need to tell?

15. Accepting and appreciating
uncertainties
• Learning to ask good questions
• Making hypotheses that direct
learning or research effort

16. The basis for independent life-long
learning
• Critical thinking
• Simplification
• Summarization
• Asking questions, making hypotheses
–Being comfortable with uncertainty
• Strong basis in stable STEM foundations

17. What STEM basis will you need?
• Math: calculus and linear algebra
– If you know these, then thermodynamics, physical
chemistry and statistics are not very difficult
• Statistics
– Design of experiments, regression analysis,
analysis of variance
• Physics, chemistry

18. To keep learning…
• Pose yourself questions that interest you
– Without a question your studies have no direction
– Without direction, there is just too much, and more
every day…
• If you do research, nothing is more important
than a “good question”!
– There is the other type, too. You want to ask
questions that could be answered! For this, you need
to know what has become possible to manipulate and
observe, with the developments in STEM.

19. Why we do research?
• Today’s research may be tomorrow’s
technology
• Teachers who don’t follow research might not
prepare you for your future!
• You do research to
– Demonstrate you know how research is done (MS)
– Demonstrate mastery of techniques (MS)
– Demonstrate mostly independent contribution to
science (PhD)

20. Why does a company do research?
• Research helps fix problems and enables
decisions. R&D = Research and Development.
– Could we use a different type of mixer, separator, heat
exchanger, raw material mix, …
– Can we reduce some quality problem
– Can we increase production rate
– Could we develop a competitive new product
• It is always about product, its quality, and
productivity
– Novelty or publications have very low priority, unless
the novelty is valuable and patentable.

21. PhD: driver’s license to doing science
• Doing a PhD is like a test drive.
– You have support from an advisor. Your scope of
research is pre-defined. You need to come up with
some “new science” and defend your thesis.
• Once you have your PhD
– You are expected to be an independent researcher
who no longer needs an advisor!
– Don’t expect your thesis is your career. When you
have your license, you will not stay on the test track,
you need to learn about other roads and go to places.

22. Industry or academic job?
• Academia produces PhD’s who go to academia
to produce more PhD’s who go to academia…
– It could become a big club, as long as someone
pays for the fun. In the long run this is impossible,
academia feeding its own growth and not feeding
the outside world.
– Go outside to see what is done in the “real world”
with science. Maintain contact with academics,
perhaps come back to tell what you learned.

23. Reality restricts your options
• http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-many-phds-actually-get-to-become-
college-professors/273434/

24. Discipline…
• Safeguard your data
– Dropbox, Onedrive, Box, …
• Organize your project folder
– References
– Proposal and planning
– Materials and methods
• Raw materials, data sheets, measurement devices, sampling and
sample sources
– Experimental designs
– Experimental data
– Analysis of data
– Reporting

25. Finding literature
• Google search “… AND filetype:pdf”
• Google scholar
– Check for a prominent researcher in your field
• ScienceDirect
• JANE: Journal Author Name Estimator

26. How to read a paper
• Title
• Abstract
• Conclusions
• Figures
• Then read the rest…
• If you have more time and interest, find some
of the references.

27. When you review a journal article…
• You must answer these questions:
– What is this about
– Why is the topic important
– What was done
– Key result (or “what happened?”)
• Implications on practice OR on research activities
– What was left unanswered (according to authors)
• … and this is the real test of your understanding:
– Your critique of the article

28. Here is a Magic Spell
• Issue
• Significance
• Approach
• Results
• Conclusions

29. The Magic Spell applies to many things
• A one-page project proposal
• A full project proposal
• A summary of someone else’s work
• Summarizing your project plan
• Writing a poster
• Giving a presentation
• Writing an article

30. Discussion with the Boss man
• Yes, you wanted to see me. What is this about?
– Issue: what is this about
• Well, I have other more important things…
– Significance: why this is important
• OK, but what can we do about it?
– Approach: actions to take
• So if we do all that, what do we get?
– (expected) results: products of the actions
• And what is the value of the results?
– Conclusions: effects on decisions, practices, …

31. Be prepared to see the Magic Spell
several times today
• Issue
• Significance
• Approach
• Results
• Conclusions