Nature of Research...

Just tried to explain to another curious undergrad, what it's like to do research... i get quite a few undergrads asking me this from time to time.. and i like to use two analogies to explain it...

first, research is like banging your head against a hard wall... and then, hoping that the wall gives way before your head does... that exemplifies the situation of trying to solve the various problems that will definitely surface over the course of research... problems with no apparent solutions in sight... but these problems will still need to be overcomed, with ingenuity or skirted around with creativity... which is more difficult than it initially seems...

second, reseach is like, locking yourself in a big dark room, turning off the lights, spinning yourself around a few times, and then trying to find the door, without any help... this shows the situation of trying to achieve a goal, without any idea of where to go nor how to get there.. quite often, you lose sight of the goal, and there's no one to help out either... however, you would still need to take a step... if it's a right step, it brings you closer to the goal... but if it's the wrong one, you may trip, fall, and have to start all over again...

hence, researchers are quite often stressed and depressed... it's just the nature of the work... that's why hollywood likes to paint the picture of a dysfunctional, disgruntled, disheveled researcher... it's comes with the territory... periodically, i will suddenly feel like doing nothing except to sit in my room and stare at the wall... other times, i will just have emotional outbursts for no apparent reason... after going through all that, i've got a newfound respect for people who have earned their phds... these people are built tough...

why am i up at this hour?? i'm very excited... there's this one bible that i've read a couple of times before... six months ago, it didn't provide me with much useful info for my research... however, reading it again tonite, it seemed to provide me answers to all the questions that have been bugging me for the last two months... i'm going to re-read the relevant parts of it again... it's interesting, how a book provides different information over different readings... this'll require rewriting large chunks of my thesis and redoing most of my design... hope it's worth it...