A recent post discussed the importance of learning how to read a field’s literature, looking for gaps, unsolved puzzles, and weaknesses in arguments. This is an important part of the intellectual growth of students, especially those in graduate programs seeking to expand the knowledge of a given field.
One of the most important contributions that researchers can make to a field is forming a question in a way that a) links it to important unknowns in the field and b) points to a direction in answering the question. This first attribute could be rephrased as “asking important questions,” not narrow offshoots of the current knowledge. The second is equally important – constructing a question that suggests the steps that could provide an answer to the question. Often, this latter is the rarer of the two attributes. Unknowns abound, in all fields. A prerequisite for impact is reforming a question about a gap in understanding in a way that indicates how one would approach an answer.
Top scholars in every field seem to have a talent for choosing the important questions to study. They push a field forward and have greater impact on the world because they force attention to those type of questions. They switch topics when they believe that the big breakthroughs have been made in a subfield, when the area is stably mapped out or understood. They move to the next big question.
These observations are quite relevant to the act of identifying a dissertation topic by PhD students. The choice of dissertation topic is a seminal act of creation for a scholar. Ideally, given the observations above at how scholarly impact is achieved, the choice would be the result of careful discernment of important gaps in the field. After the identification of the problem or knowledge gap, the student would form a research question filling the gap, constructed to be answered with the dissertation research. Again, asking important questions in ways that point to practical inquiries is itself a desirable outcome of a graduate program.
In sharp contrast to the above strategy for dissertation topic choice is one in which the chair of the dissertation committee essentially identifies a problem and the PhD student works on the problem as the dissertation topic. If the chair is an accomplished talent in identifying important questions, such a dissertation can indeed be a successful addition to the field’s knowledge.
However, being assigned a dissertation topic carries two risks for the student. First, the candidate is cheated of the lessons of identifying a research question on their own. Second, the chair is potentially too invested in the problem and may offer extraordinary assistance to the candidate as the dissertation progresses. That is, the dissertation may become a joint research project instead of the work of the candidate themselves.
The first weakness of this approach, in my experience, appears after the dissertation is completed. Those who were “given” a dissertation topic seem to be slower to form their own research program. They tend to remain dependent on their mentor too long to establish their own reputation. They haven’t experienced the rigor of identifying important research questions, except under the tutelage of their mentor.
I once found myself in the company of the CEO of a global enterprise of vast scale. I asked him, in running the company, what his most precious resource. He said, “finding staff who can ask the right question. I can always buy experts to answer the question, but I rarely find people that identify the important question for the company to answer.” As in business, so too in academic research. Educating students to ask the right question requires deliberate attention in a curriculum. Students, armed with such skills, however, can indeed set the world on fire.