cheers!

“How do you evaluate whether a problem is worth pursuing? When do you decide to give up? As a graduate student with the attending pressures, how are these evaluations made? How do you adjust this decision making as you move up the career ladder?”

Worth pursuing? A combination of the potential usefulness of knowing its solution and the likelihood that I can solve it. Sometimes I don’t even know if those two criteria are satisfied or not…. sometimes the problem is just cute. It is really hard to give a proper answer I would say. Experience is probably the most reliable guide in the long run. That you get from working with people more senior than you (advisor or other mentor) for a while. It’s also why attendance at conferences and workshops are useful…. you can put things in context, and learn about what some of the key problems in your field are considered to be.

Giving up? If no progress is being made at all, and there are no good hints that your problem is tractable… put it to one side and work on something else. But keep careful notes on what you did… it may well be that at some unexpected point in the future this very problem may resurface in another guise….as might its solution.

Career stages? As a graduate student on a fixed schedule to graduating, your advisor’s responsibility is to guide you in the answers to all of these questions to help you complete on time. He or She will be better than you at assessing the worth of a problem, the likely route to solution, and advising you on the tricks and techniques you need to bring to the problem. They’ll not always be right, and many times you’ll find a better way, and eventually you will (should) outgrow them in the particular area you’ll have made your own. But for the most part, they’ll have very useful and (on balance) wise things to say about how to proceed.

Overall, don’t pick a problem that is just way too ambitious! Sure, we all want to work on the problems that will take us to Stockholm, but if we bite off more than we can chew and as a result never produce results in time to ensure we can stay on the career ladder, then we’ll definitely not go to Stockholm. So at earlier stages you want to use the phd for what it is designed to be: training in doing research…. although it should still be original, challenging, and worthwhile, that phd work does not have to be your career best work. Build up to it… As you get more secure in your career, and in your own abilities, you can take greater risks…

Cheers,

-cvj

Thanks. I’ll try to say some careful words about this a bit later on. Got to go now, and occupied a lot tomorrow with a big meeting. Sorry.

Go and see some good Jazz at the Village Vanguard. Then I will easily be jealous of you.

Cheers,

-cvj

I think it would be great to get a bunch of theorists to write up their answers to these questions and more.

cheers! (by the way, so jealous of you right now. I am stuck in NYC, and I only wish I could see flowers like the ones in your photos from yesterday …)