Course:
Our approach is to demystify the research process, and to learn how to
approach a research proposal and research problem step by step. We’ll start out by having you give a short
description of several potential research questions, select one, and develop it
into a proposal. An important part of
the class is for you to give feedback to other students to get feedback from
other students and from your mentor.
Along the way, we will also discuss many other facets of the research
process.
1.
Generate ideas
2.
Select and refine your question, incorporating what’s known and not
3.
Refine what you test and how you will interpret results
4.
Develop a Preliminary Research Plan
5.
Get and give feedback
6.
Develop a Final Research Plan
This is the
fifth year Mike has been involved in EY693, and past students can give you
great insight about how the class works.
Most of them appreciated the structure and the systematic approach. Alan Knapp also teaches another section of
EY693 (noon on Wednesdays), with a different approach – he focuses on proposal
presentation and feedback from the class, but not on proposal development. Both approaches work, and the approach is
your choice. Jeff Hicke has been working
with NREL for the past few years and this will be his first year of involvement
in the course. Jeff’s research
background is meteorology, and meteorologists do not generally do designed
‘experiments’, so he brings a nice additional perspective to the course.
Mike:
I’m sorry I can’t be here for the first class, but I’ll give you a bit
of my background. I really enjoy doing
research, and I consider myself very lucky to have a career in research! It is incredible fun to invent the future by
posing and answering interesting research questions. It’s also led me to many interesting people
and places. I’ve been doing research for
the past 20 years, and have authored or co-authored about 90 papers, most of
them in refereed journals. My research
centers on understanding how plant ecophysiology controls processes at the
ecosystem level, with a focus on the carbon cycle at the patch scale. My website has many of my papers available as
pdfs and a description of several of my research activities. I tend to like experimental research aimed at
testing hypotheses and also collaborative research.
1. We’d like to make sure that the course will
meet your needs. To help me do so, could
you please email us at least five things you most want to learn about doing
research, or have the most uncertainty about?
More than five is fine. We’ll
collate these and distribute them to the class next week, and share any that
came up in the last two years that you didn’t have.
2. We’d
like to get you started right away thinking about research problems. Pick at least two research questions that
interest you, and write a short paragraph about each that explains the
background, why its important, and how it might be answered (1-2 sentences for
each point). If you have already done a
research proposal for your thesis research, we suggest picking something you
might wish to explore further and perhaps eventually write a grant to do.
3. Please
write a short paragraph of introduction:
Name, background, degree (MS or
PhD), advisor, general area will you be researching. Also a sentence or two on your research
experience and at what point are you in your thesis research, and how you became
interested in learning how to do research.
Please
email them to us (mgryan@fs.fed.us, jhicke@nrel.colostate.edu) by Monday,
January 23, 12pm (noon).
Ford,
Chapters 1-3 handout will be used for the next two classes.