Inertia is your main enemy in the research process. At every step in the process, there are fits and starts of progress. Each and every step is an opportunity to take a few days off, and those days add up to more lost productivity than the time you spend doing the work. Finishing a piece of your project is an invitation to take a day off before the next part, and having not worked on your project for a day makes it even harder to start. Ultimately, the quality of the product is a direct result of the amount of time put into it. To some extent, doing the work well is not even a priority. For example, I spent two years doing a product I could have finished in three months if I had known the correct step to take every time and stayed dedicated. Even now, I missed the opportunity for two more weeks of revision that would have made the project a success. In order to reach the efficient end of the curve, however, you need to struggle first. You need to put in hours learning what data matters and how to work with it. It is all a matter of time.
Unfortunately, the period when you have the most time is when you value it the least, and the time you need time the most is the time when you have the least of it to spend. In such a case, spending time earlier and more than you think you need to will help to correct for your undervaluation of your research time.
Now that I’ve told you my best advice for doing the project itself, I should probably talk about how to get yourself through it. Talk to people. Research can be a painful and lonely process, but having friends to keep you accountable can make you look forward to reporting your progress. If you can do that, you can outsource the responsibility for holding yourself accountable to other people.
Also in the vein of making the process easier on yourself: pick a good advisor. Think about who has both the expertise to give you meaningful advice about what to do, but also pick someone who has the extra bandwidth to meet with you regularly. Getting a secondary mentor can also be a good idea to help lighten the load on your advisor. I have seen great projects and good students brought low by an advisor who did not respect the gravity of the task they were undertaking in agreeing to help. It is crucial to make this decision well when you do it the first time, because there will come a point –perhaps a month before the project is due- when you will be unable to function with an advisor who demands sweeping changes to the paper but also takes two weeks to give feedback on how to achieve those techniques. That may sound like a scenario plucked from the nightmares of a panicked undergraduate researcher, but I saw it happen.
In closing, I’d like to share a bit of wisdom that I have not yet had the ability to learn organically. Your project is trash. Your literature review is incomplete, your methods are embarrassingly simple. Your data are shoddy and your conclusions are faulty. And that’s ok. The value you gain from passing through this research writing process is not the paper you come out with on the back end, but the skills you gain along the way. You will learn how to research, write, design slides, and overcome failure. Most importantly, you will learn to struggle. The struggle will give you the confidence to approach greater projects in the future with less guidance. You will find that you understand the plan. For example, the two years I spent plodding slowly through a project that ended up being easier in hindsight were also transferable to another big-data analysis project that was recently sprung upon me. The project was billed as requiring more man-hours than a single human could devote in a week. I did it and won first prize for a sum total of no more than 20 man-hours. This was only possible because I had fought with the same types of analysis and knew from experience the problems I would encounter before I started. In a way, it felt like a reunion with an old friend. So, whatever you ultimately go on to do after this project, you may have learned a few hard skills you can employ and you will have improved the soft skills to employ them.
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