Ask HN: How did you figure out what research field you were passionate about?

7 pointsaabiji23d ago7 comments

I'll be graduating high school in a few months and I have no real plan for my life. I applied to electrical engineering at various universities because hardware and computing systems seemed interesting enough, and it's a practical choice. In school I got high nineties in physics, calculus, chemistry and biology class, but none of it really excited me or made me want to keep going on my own time.

What does pull me is the idea of research itself: actually discovering new stuff, adding to knowledge instead of just using what's already there. The problem is I don't have a field that excites me yet. I feel like I haven't seen enough of any discipline to know if it's worth years (or a lifetime) of focus.

For people who ended up in research careers, how did you figure it out? Was there a specific moment, project, class, paper, or random conversation that inspired you? Did you mostly wander through undergrad, switching majors or labs or taking odd electives until something stuck, or did it come earlier for you?

How do you know when something is more than a passing interest, when it's the kind of thing that could actually sustain you long-term? Is it the questions that keep nagging at you years later, or the daily grind of experiments/debugging/reading feeling surprisingly okay (or even good), or some other signal? Any stories from when you were directionless at my age but eventually found your thing would be great. Low-stakes ways a freshman could poke around different areas without locking in too soon? Summer programs, random labs, self-reading that helped?

7 comments

skyberrys21d ago

I found my research field in undergrad ( that lead to grad research ) from going to university talks. To apply it to this situation, once you are in an EE program get the events list for multiple departments and try going to every talk scheduled. Talk to your teaching assistants ask them what they are doing and to tell you about events.

I did wander somewhat but every major to topic I started on I finished. I see another comment recommending a physics program and that is true. I did my undergrad in this, went to talks for physics, CE, CS and EE. The topic I choose was the one I found myself staying up to 3am for just one more experiment run. Once that kept happening it's a good signal you can keep after something and contribute to advancing research.

gus_massa22d ago

Hard question, but it probably matter less than expected. You can change fields after graduation.

Ask about Physics programs. They have more focus in research, but it may be too abstract for your preferences.

Taking a few electives in the university is a good way to meet people/topics and see what you like.

austin-cheney23d ago

Just start building things. Every once in a while you will build something no one else can. It’s not that you are the most brilliant person ever but that you have found a niche that isn’t trendy. When that niche also solves real problems my interest grows really high.

marysminefnuf23d ago

Asked god for a sign and found out about braiding in math

mdritch23d ago

yeah working in "random" (in a domain that sounds interesting and hiring undergrads) labs is a great tactic. do that asap, it helped me

ggm23d ago

Finding a story helped. I found a story in the DNS, and it led to a sense there were stories to find, and I enjoyed finding them.

Having people come back with good questions helped. It means they are interested in the stories you are telling. Even being told they found weaknesses in your story helps, because it suggests there is more work to do.

Finding peers helps. Ruben Hirsch has talked about how in mathematics your field can be so narrow there are only 4 people you can talk to and 2 of them are doing your peer review so when things are rejected, you know who rejected it. He talks about this as a problem, but it's in the context of a branching tree of fields and of course there are parent branches with more people and side branches with more people. The point is not to have no speciality (being a generalist is a choice too) but the point is to understand who else is in your field and how you relate to them and talk to them.

Many biologists simply love the animal they study. to you or me it's just a ladybird. To them, it is embued with all the ideals of what being a ladybird IS, and that begs questions: why that number of dots? Is more dots more fertile? Is less dots more visible to a predator? Do more dots weigh more? do they cost more energy to paint? Where do ladybirds buy dot paint from? At this point, you are the ladybird. you are consumed by dots. Your life as you knew it, is defined by ladybirds. It helps that a famous movie actor is now enacting ladybird sex movies for kicks, making your fascination with ladybirds both topical, and interesting. You used to wear a small ladybird badge to parties. You are now at the igNobels, dressed as a ladybird, accepting a prize.

4 decades ago I was a bottle washer and water collector on slave wages for a long term marine ecology measurement of water quality and flows around an estuary. I visited the beach 60 times in a year. I could imagine myself being consumed by fascination with tides, and becoming a tides person, or with seaweed/laminaria and becoming a kelp farmer, or with nudibranches and somehow now measuring sewage levels indirectly by nudibranch population statistics, or designing better sewage outlets after learning how this influences water quality. Meh. I gave up marine biology bottle washing and took up computing. But the choice was there.

My point is that sure, you need to pay the bills, but also pay some respect to a drive in yourself to want to find out things. Thats key.

aabijiOP23d ago

That is such a good way to frame things, never thought about it that way. Thanks!

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