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The Geography of Mars

Graduate Student Project

Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D.

Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840-1101
1 (562) 985-4895
rodrigue@csulb.edu
https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/

Guidelines for the Graduate Student Research Project:

The University requires that graduate students enrolled in a double-numbered 400/500 course do significantly more work in the course in recognition of their educational advantages over undergraduates (you should be in the 541 section, by the way, to get graduate credit for it!). In this course, that graduate student extra will be a research project in which you will select martian data, formulate a problem or hypothesis you can use those data to answer or test, process your data, and then report on the results. My intent here is to have you do an original research project that you could present at a professional conference or symposium. Who knows? This could be the pilot study for your future thesis project!

If you look through refereed journal articles, whether those you use for your bibliographic essay or those you encounter in other classes, you will notice a very common organization, which I encourage you to use in this project. Indeed, look through the master's theses completed in your department, and you will notice the chapter structure is very similar. This is, basically, a common way of structuring the communication of research in a wide variety of natural and social sciences.

It generally consists of five or six sections, the particular configuration varying a bit because of the different needs of a given project. Here is a table summarizing three common variants:

Variant A:
  1. Introduction (including literature review, purpose, hypotheses or research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
  2. Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods, processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how you dealt with them)
  3. Results (question by question or hypothesis by hypothesis: what happened?)
  4. Discussion (where you relate your results to the literature and draw out the importance of your fndings)
  5. Conclusions (emphasize directions for future research or recommendations; research problems that you couldn't resolve could be discussed as suggestions for future work)
Variant B:
  1. Introduction (including purpose, importance, hypotheses or research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
  2. Literature Review (some projects require discussion of a lot of classic and contemporary literature, enough to fill up an entire separate section)
  3. Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods, processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how you dealt with them)
  4. Results and Discussion (sometimes it is easier to discuss findings and their meaning together)
  5. Conclusions
Variant C:
  1. Introduction (including purpose, importance, hypotheses or research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
  2. Study Area (some projects are based on one or a few case studies and it may be necessary to provide a detailed description of it/them and any geological, meteorological, climatological, historical, political, or cultural characteristics needed to understand the context)
  3. Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods, processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how you dealt with them)
  4. Results
  5. Discussion
  6. Conclusions

Normally, you develop a project by reading in the literature thoroughly enough to get a sense of what the controversies and gaps in it are. Then, you formulate a problem based on the gaps or arguments and, after that, go looking for data that you could process to get an answer. This is the process you'll be working through to develop your thesis proposal.

This is, however, a short course, one measly semester long. So, I'd like you to turn this process on its head for the sake of efficiency. First, find data and then figure out what you can do with them. Then, find a way to situate your data and method in a larger literature.

If you jump right on this, you may be able to double-dip your bibliographic essay and your research project, which would certainly be a welcome relief. You can use your bibliographic essay to frame your data-driven project (though you will almost certainly need to find more articles than the bare minimum to get through that assignment).

So, about those data ... There are just huge troves of it all over: NASA and ESA are sinking in a tsunami of data! Some of them exist as single images; others exist as data tables in the back of someone's article; there are huge buckets in assorted archives. Here are a few leads:

As with any paper, writing mechanics count! Please make sure your paper is extremely well edited and that you have very conscientiously documented everything (for more resources on how I evaluate writing mechanics, please revisit the bibliographic essay guidelines.

Assuming you do a solid job, I would strongly encourage you to present your paper as a talk or as a poster. This is really a résumé enhancer, by the way. Suitable conferences will be in spring 2023, all using some mix of in-person and Zoom:

Additionally, time will be provided on December 1st for you to share the highlights of your work with the class.

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This document is maintained by Dr. Rodrigue
First placed online: 01/10/12
Last updated: 08/17/22