I am quite lucky that, despite being a double major, I am finished with most of the requirements to receive undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics after this semester. The grueling 18 or 20-credit semesters for the past two and a half years, with some additional summer courses sprinkled in, have paid off!
Now I only have two lecture courses this semester, and my two other “courses” are research credits for my senior research project. This is great because last semester I became rather stressed because I had very little time to work on this project.
The extra time does come with a bit of a caveat: I now have to plan out my research, which is mostly self-directed. My research advisor and I plan out tasks at our weekly meetings, and then it is my job to structure my time in order to make progress on the tasks. What’s even more difficult is that we’re exploring new territory at this point, so it is hard to say whether the progress I make is indeed correct.
Moreover, it is very easy to get side-tracked with topics that seem to be related to the research, but may not really be. I did this over the past couple of weeks by looking at a different problem-solving approach to the topic of my project, but after talking about it with my advisor, we decided to stick with our original approach.
I was worried I had done something wrong by going down this rabbit hole, but my advisor also provided some encouragement (something she’s great at doing, and for which I’m deeply grateful). I had taken some initiative by looking at this new approach, and my ideas made sense according to my advisor. Even though we decided to not go further with this approach, these words of encouragement gave me a confidence boost for continuing work on the original approach.
And I think the even more important takeaway from discussions with my advisor is that this project doesn’t have to be the most groundbreaking research in the world. Research in general is all about incremental progress — to truly understand new frontiers of a topic, you first need to carefully and thoroughly tread through them.
So, while my research project will be presented in two months at the Innovation Expo, my main focus should be to make that incremental progress, and that way, I should still have a good deal of solid work to report on by the end of the semester. And after I graduate, there’s nothing stopping me from continuing work on the project, and eventually building small progress into more substantial findings.
Not all things are like this kind of research — deadlines can be hard and professors, managers, or bosses may demand something be done quickly, but in projects where there is this increased flexibility of time constraints, I would recommend taking a similar approach. Small progress is more impressive than you think and can lead to big results as long as you are patient, curious, and dedicated. I hope that this strategy for project completion will yield you success, and what’s more, higher levels of fulfillment and lower levels of stress.
