Resources from UC Merced Graduate Division

All of the advice and links from Grad Div's Grad Resource Center can be helpful in forming your research agenda as well as guiding your time as a graduate student at UC Merced. But I'd like to point you to a certain resource highlighted by GradDiv that can benefit not only how your form and adapt your Research Agenda, but also how you approach your Time Management throughout your years as a graduate researcher: introducing the Invidual Development Plan. Grad Div specifically recommends myIDP from Science Careers. According to Science Careers, the IDP is actually commonly used in industry to pursue career goals, but has been adapted and expanded first for postdoctoral fellows by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), and further tailored for PhD students by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Why are Individual Development Plans important? The creators of myIDP, Jennifer A. Hobin, Cynthia N. Fuhrmann, Bill Lindstaedt, and Philip S. Clifford, explain in their article: You Need a Game Plan. Since there are no hard and fast rules for how to make a successful scientific career, myIDP helps address challenges of the post-PhD job market by helping gradute students and post docs form individualized, adaptive strategies to reach career-specific goals. "Our [the creators'] goal is to help you gain stronger self-awareness, identify resources and strategies, and create your own game plan for identifying, attaining, and succeeding in the career that is right for you." Read more below for advice from a professor and from graduate students on forming a research agenda, and when you're ready, click here to start forming your own IDP to work toward acheiving your graduate study and post-PhD goals!

______

Advice from a Professor

Dr Milena Keller-Marguilis, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Houston, has outlined a definition of a Research Agenda that is not only helpful in guiding graduate studies, but can serve to guide your research throughout your career. Keller-Marguilis defines a reserch agenda succinctly as "a roadmap or framework that guides inquiry." She goes on to explain that "a clear research agenda serves two important purposes. First, it can help you communicate to others what you study and the area in which you have developed (or are developing) expertise. Second, it serves to guide your decision-making about what projects or specific research questions to pursue. Ultimately, you must be interested in and excited about the topic(s) at the heart of your research agenda."

Below are a few useful tips from Keller-Marguilis's post in the SSSP Early Career Forum

Use your Research Agenda as your Roadmap: One of the most exciting aspects of working in academia and engaging in research is the limitless topics and projects you can pursue. This is also a challenge because you have to make choices as to where you will invest your time. Evaluate each potential research opportunity for the degree to which it is consistent with your agenda.

Develop an Infrastructure: There are some logistic or infrastructure elements that you might consider in the early stages of developing your agenda. You should consider what you need to facilitate your work. Do you need space or support in the form of research assistants? Materials? Access to certain settings or populations of interest? Build a team of students to help you advance your agenda. (At UC Merced, we're brimming with bright undergraduate students who are eager to participate on our projects as Research Assistants or through a variety of semester and summer Undergraduate Research Opportunities!)

Get Connected: Another strategy to further develop your research agenda is to collaborate with other scholars who are interested in the same topics. This can be accomplished in an informal way by meeting at conferences (e.g. attend social hours or networking events) or sending a friendly email but there are also structured mentoring/networking opportunities you can utilize.

Perhaps most importantly, Keller-Marguilis lists the two key ways to Put your Agenda into Action

Conduct Research in areas that are the focus of your research agenda.

Disseminate the Products of your Research Agenda...through writing proposals for conference presentations, writing grant proposals (small or large), and writing for publication.

______

Advice from Graduate Students

Fellow graduate students also have sage advice for forming a research agenda during graduate school, Justin Reedy and Madhavi Murty were graduate students in communication at the University of Washington when they wrote the following tips for Inside Higher Ed.

What is a research agenda? It’s a plan and a focus on issues and ideas in a subset of your field. You cannot study everything in your field during your time in graduate school, so decide what to focus on now, and what to defer until another day.

Research agendas are not set in concrete; they naturally change over time as your knowledge grows and as new research questions emerge.

Don’t be intimidated. Many students may start a graduate program with only a few ideas of areas they would like to study, or perhaps a few general research questions. Graduate courses, conversations with faculty and fellow students, and time spent reading the literature in the field can help you start to form a research agenda out of those ideas or research questions.

Reedy and Murty list concrete ways to get started, including talking with your faculty members, talking with other students, reading extensively, and following up on citations from key papers and authors that are relevant to your research.

As far as advancing your research agenda, they emphasize taking courses both inside and outside your department (espeically for interdisciplinary research), and try to use class assignments specifically to advance your research agenda. The structure and deadlines of a course paper can help you solidify a literature review or iron out a proposal for your next study.

Perhaps most importantly, Reedy and Murty advise graduate students to be active and to be a part of the conversation in your field. This can be through conference papers, colloquia, research articles, as well as conversation and collaboration with faculty and graduate students both at your institution and beyond.

Any research agenda will incorporate a long range research goal. Quite sensibly, the factors that make a good long range research goal are similar to to factors that make for good SMART goals for effective Time Management. The following is a list from Microsoft Researcher Jim Gray, in his 1999 Turing Award Lecture: What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals.

A good long range goal should be:

Understandable: The goal should be simple to state. A sentence, or at most a paragraph should suffice to explain the goal to intelligent people. Having a clear statement helps recruit colleagues and support. It is also great to be able to tell your friends and family what you actually do.

Challenging: It should not be obvious how to achieve the goal. Indeed, often the goal has been around for a long time. Most of the goals I am going to describe have been explicit or implicit goals for many years. Often, there is a camp who believe the goal is impossible.

Useful: If the goal is achieved, the resulting system should be clearly useful to many people -- I do not mean just computer scientists, I mean people at large.

Testable: Solutions to the goal should have a simple test so that one can measure progress and one can tell when the goal is achieved.

Incremental: It is very desirable that the goal has intermediate milestones so that progress can be measured along the way. These small steps are what keep the researchers going.

Edsger Dijkstra was a Dutch mathemetician and computer scientist, as well as a pioneer of early distributed computing and object-oriented programming. Following a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, he sought work essentially in industry (as many of our Merced Cognitive and Information Sciences graduates do!) at a Dutch National Research Institute, known as the Mathematisch Centrum at the time. He rejoined academia proper as a professor of mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology, collaborated further in industry via the Burroughs Corporation, and saw out his career as chair of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dijkstra's story is an example of where a PhD and skills in programming (skills such as those which many of us develop here) can take you-- both outside of and within academia. Further, as a professor, he viewed teaching 'not just as a required activity, but as a serious research endeavor, [and that] a major goal of research should be to create teachable material.' Lucky for us, Dijstra wrote prolifically and frequently to his colleagues. The Center for American History at UT Austin has worked to transcribe and publish Dijkstra's many unpublished correspondences, known collectively as the EWD Papers, providing us with the benefit of learning from his insights. IMO, the most beneficial insight is the document linked below, listing three pragmatic rules for succesful scientific research. At the end of the note, Dijkstra writes 'The rules may strike you as a bit cruel... If so, they should, for the sooner you have discovered that the scientific world is not a soft place but --like most other worlds, for that matter-- a fairly ruthless one, the better. My blessings are with you. '

And so, without further ado ---

The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Researh EWD637

Rule 1

The first rule is an "internal" one: it has nothing to do with your relation with others, it concerns you yourself in isolation. It is as follows:

"Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward."

This rule tells us that the obviously possible should be shunned as well as the obviously impossible: the first would not be instructive, the second would be hopeless, and both in their own way are barren.

Rule 2

The second rule is an "external" one: it deals with the relation between "the scientific world" and "the real world". It is as follows:

"We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail."

The reason for this rule is obvious. If you do a piece of "perfect" work in which no one is interested, no harm is done, on the contrary: at least something "perfect"—be it irrelevant—has been added to our culture. If, however, you offer a shaky, would-be solution to an urgent problem, you do indeed harm to the world which, in view of the urgency of the problem, will only be too willing to apply your ineffective remedy. It is no wonder that charlatanry always flourishes in connection with incurable diseases. (Our second rule is traditionally violated by social sciences to such an extent that one can now question if they deserve the name "sciences" at all.)

Rule 3

The third rule is on the scale "internal/external" somewhere in between: it deals with the relation between you and your scientific colleagues. it is as follows:

"Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you."

Again the reason is obvious. If others will come up with as good a solution as you could obtain, the world doesn't loose a thing if you leave the problem alone. A corollary of the third rule is that one should never compete with one's colleagues. If you are pretty sure that in a certain area you will do a better job than anyone else, please do it in complete devotion, but when in doubt, abstain. The third rule ensures that your contributions --if any!-- will be unique.