Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
to no experience with conducting your own project. In rare cases, your advisor will hold your
hand through the entire process. In all likelihood however, your advisor will take the stance
that as a graduate student, you must begin taking responsibility for your own education and
intellectual development and therefore you must do the major critical thinking and analysis
work yourself. You are not alone, however. Ask questions in class. Talk to your classmates,
particularly those further along in the program. Take advantage of your professors' office
hours. Read this topic.
It is the rare student who enters graduate school after four (or five) years of undergraduate
work where the emphasis was first on rote memorization and later, critical thinking, who has
developed their intellectual maturity to the point where they already know exactly what they
want to do their thesis or dissertation on and how to go about it. Most first-year graduate
students in anthropology basically know that they are interested in anthropology and prob-
ably which subfield they are leaning towards. While you probably had to identify where your
interests lay when you applied to graduate school, this was probably a generalization. You
might even find that after your first semester of graduate school you are no longer interested
in what you stated in your letter of intent. Moving the several steps fromwhat you are gener-
ally interested in to narrowing down a specific research project is challenging and takes some
work. Do not despair if you have no idea yet where to focus your research efforts. This
chapter and topic are designed to help you work out the steps you need to take in order to
answer that ever-elusive question, “Just how do I think of an idea?”
Observation
As with the first step of the scientific method, the first step towards thinking of an idea is
observation. This can be done in a variety of ways. Pay attention to interesting or seemingly
unusual features on the skeleton, to comments your peers make, to things you've read, to
what your professors say in class. You never know when a simple observation will spark
an idea. As you take your upper division biological anthropology courses, we recommend
that you write down any questions or thoughts you have in your notebook. At least once
per class there should be something that really sparks your interest. At the end of the
semester, collect all of these thoughts into a single journal. This will be your “thesis/research
development journal.” Perhaps some of your questions were answered later on in the
semester, but maybe not to your satisfaction, and you would be interested in exploring
one of these questions for yourself. Further, be aware of what resources your college or
university or any other nearby institutions have for research. Are there skeletal collections
available? What kinds of laboratories exist? Knowing this at the outset and perhaps taking
a tour when possible might help you focus your thinking at this point
d
whether or not
you will use these resources for your project.
Ask Questions
Further, you have probably been exposed to dozens or maybe even hundreds of skeletons
by now. You already know that you find the skeleton very interesting; otherwise you would
not have opted to embark on its advanced study. Ask yourself a series of questions regarding
your interests about the skeleton. What are a few things that you find
most
interesting about
