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:
-
Introduction (including literature review, purpose, hypotheses or
research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
-
Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods,
processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how
you dealt with them)
-
Results (question by question or hypothesis by hypothesis: what
happened?)
-
Discussion (where you relate your results to the literature and draw
out the importance of your fndings)
-
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:
-
Introduction (including purpose, importance, hypotheses or research
questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
-
Literature Review (some projects require discussion of a lot of classic
and contemporary literature, enough to fill up an entire separate section)
-
Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods,
processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how
you dealt with them)
-
Results and Discussion (sometimes it is easier to discuss findings and
their meaning together)
-
Conclusions
|
Variant C:
-
Introduction (including purpose, importance, hypotheses or research
questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
-
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)
-
Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods,
processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how
you dealt with them)
-
Results
-
Discussion
-
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.