One of my pet interests is how do we solve the problem that there are so many people interested in doing original research but not enough people out there to mentor them on how to do it effectively.

One line of thought I’ve been exploring consists of breaking down exactly what a phd supervisor does (or should do) for their student and seeing which of those things can be scaled (one mentor for many mentees), which parts can be crowdsourced, which parts can be done by AI, which parts can someone learn to do for themselves, and which parts are left that really need to be done in a one-on-one relationship with an expert.

One of those things that a supervisor does is help a student find a research topic. But if you don’t have a supervisor (or your supervisor isn’t helping you!), you have to figure it out for yourself. I’ve written about how to do this briefly before.

If you’re in this boat, you might be interested in this virtual symposium coming up (May 3) on identifying impactful research topics. The symposium is in the context of meta science, but I expect there will be some useful takeaways to other research areas.

Want to share your thoughts? You can join the discussion on LinkedIn.