Some Aspects of the Research Need to Balance I. The problem A. What kind of problem: both interesting and (1) ______ B. How to f

Some Aspects of the Research Need to Balance
    Good morning, everyone! Welcome to the research writing class. As you may know that successful research cannot really be broken down into a formula, or a one-size-fits-all rule. Successful researchers have had many different approaches. The key to successful research, like the key to many things in life, is balance. In this lecture we’ll discuss some aspects of the research that you need to balance in order to be successful.
    The first aspect is to balance the problem. Before you can be successful in research, you need to find the right problem to solve. (1) You need to find a problem that is both interesting and challenging. When I say it has to be interesting, I primarily mean that it has to be interesting to both you and other people. The problem also has to be challenging. If you solve an easy problem then, again, no one will care. But the problem cannot be too challenging. It has to be solvable. So again it comes down to balance—you need to find a problem that is hard enough to be interesting, but not so hard that it is impossible. Then how will you find that balance? First, the experience helps. When you have read a lot and done a lot of research, you learn to recognize what problems are too easy and what problems are too hard. Another way of looking at this is that (2) you need to find the optimum balance between difficulty and likely payoff. You want to choose a problem that you can solve, but if you choose a problem that clearly has a simple solution, then your solution will be unimpressive and the payoff will be low. There is an optimum point on this difficulty and payoff curve. Choose a problem that has a moderate level of difficulty so that the likely payoff is optimized.
    The second aspect is to balance persistence and flexibility. Successful research requires hard work. It can make up for your lack of skills in many areas. Part of hard work is persistence. Thomas Edison tried 10, 000 different designs for the light bulb before he found one that worked well. He wrote, " The electric light bulb has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments. " The same will hold true for you in your research. You may spend months trying to solve a problem. Finally your efforts will pay off and you will experience a moment when you will suddenly understand the problem that you’ve been studying for so long, a moment when you will suddenly achieve success in your experiment. On the other hand, you also need to know when to give up, or rather, when to change your approach. This is flexibility.
    Then how do you judge this? One guideline might be to recognize your natural tendency and make a conscious effort to resist it. For example, your natural tendency is stubbornness. If you recognize this tendency in yourself, then make a conscious effort to move on to the next problem when you find yourself spinning your wheels.
    The third aspect is to balance confidence and doubt. On the one hand, you have to believe in what you are doing. You have to believe that you are on the right track to finding a solution to your research problem. Thomas Edison would never have persisted for so long in his light bulb research if he wasn’t confident that he was on the right track. On the other hand, you need to inject a healthy amount of doubt into your research. Others have said that a certain method is the best way to solve some problem, but they might be wrong. You need to be willing to learn from the work of others, but you also need to take everything you read with a grain of salt.
    The fourth aspect is to balance the ability to work independently, and the ability to work as part of a team. First, you need to learn to work independently. That means you need to be able to learn on your own. If you don’t know something, you won’t always have a professor to go to for the answers. You need to develop enough initiative so that you can solve problems on your own. But it is possible to be too independent. You also need to learn to work in a team. For example, (7) you need to learn to build on the work of others, and you need to communicate your failures and your successes with others. You also need to take direction from your supervisor, which in your case is your advisor. You have to work as part of a team and under the direction of your supervisor.
    The last aspect is to find balance in your life. (8) In life, besides work, you need to have personal relationships, a spiritual life, hobbies and rest. So, normally you need to do more after you work than in school. Hard work is crucially important, as discussed earlier, (9) but if you work so hard that you don’t have time for anything else then you will find that your hard work is inefficient. When you work, work hard. But don’t rush to get your work done. Take time to think. In a study conducted in 1975, it was found that (10) good students tend to take longer to read a problem than poor students. Good students took longer to read the problem because they were thinking about it as they read it. Then they took less time to actually solve the problem. If you follow this way, in the long run you will be more productive.
    OK, in today’s lecture we’ve covered a lot of material, but ultimately research boils down to balance. So as long as you’ve grasped what we should balance, it would be very probable that your research is half done. Hopefully the ideas in this lecture will assist you in your searching for a global optimum in a life of successful research. In our next lecture, we will ask some students to talk about their problems and let’s solve them together. See you next time!