Question

Based on your experience, which aspect(s) of the research paper and/or oral defense do you anticipate will be your greatest challenge? Why? How do you plan to address challenges so that you can be successful? What resources will you seek out now, in Week 1, to prepare you for a successfully completed project?

Answer 1

Over the years, I have come to realize that the most difficult aspect of research is to find a good problematic to work on. really hard to find (a) an interesting problem, (b) an important problem, (c) a problem that people will be interested in knowing the answer to, and (d) a problem that can actually be solved.

A researcher also has to be mindful of timelines. We are not talking about a trivial problem to solve overnight nor are we talking about something that would go on forever, beyond your lifetime.

- In principle, you want to have larger problems that you can break down into smaller problems and solve those smaller issues during the period of a grant application of about 3 to 5 years. For instance, I started working on the haeme problem in 1968 on a fulltime basis and we solved it in 1975: it took us around 7 years of research to solve our problem. But we knew that it was a problem that had a solution.

I also remember that when we started out, we had to do a lot of background work to understand exactly how we would proceed and I guess that is common. Another thing that happened is that we kept being sidetracked from the main problem. Studying controls gave us a lot of fresh insight into other related mechanisms. Along the way, I also discovered that when your results challenge already established or accepted studies, you face a harder time from many people, including journal reviewers. This is the reason why you have to be completely sure of your results even if this means that you have to be your own harshest critic. That is better than having someone else question you or shoot your work down.