I'm a senior undergraduate student in computer science and I have zero experience doing research.
so, I'm posting this to ask for advice from those that have done research on what to expect, how to better organize and prepare myself.
I've already picked up few ideas that I will be discussing with a university faculty. I'm looking at doing a research paper (topics I'm looking at include wireless and bluetooth security in smart phones).
Also any advice about the mentioned research topics would be highly appreciated.
Follow academic conferences, maybe given your interests IEEE S&P, CCS, etc.
Don't expect too much supervision which means the onus is on you to get direction, update on progress, get help when you're stuck, etc.
Go to google scholar and find the 'seminal' works in your field, for example say you want to know about aerodynamics, basically every course starts with Anderson's textbook, it has almost 10k citations.
Find the books and papers with tonnes of citations. Those are likely the top books and top people in the field.
Also look for literature reviews and if you search for universities and do 'filetype:pdf' in google, you can find lecture notes and reading lists. Those are all good starting points.
As soon as you know what your topic is, start making it a habit to read research papers, take notes in the margins, highlight stuff. Read papers every week. I was lucky to have a long train ride where I had no phone service for a solid 60mins per day, so I read papers on the train almost every day.
At this point you should know who the key people are and what they are interested in, in your field and topic. For my topic I figured out there are like 20 key researchers in the field, find the ones who are regularly publishing still (last 10 years or so) and read all of their stuff.
You should be forming the 'lay of the land' now and finding patterns in where the gaps are, what future work and next steps are the researchers writing about.
Work with your supervisor to discuss what you learned and narrow down the topic.
So that is the INPUT part of the process covered.
Let's talk about the OUTPUT next.
When I was putting my thesis together, I really didn't want to have to write it all at the end or in the last few months. So my method was to imagine each chapter or so, was a paper of it's own, that built on each other.
As you read you should be putting your literature review together anyway which could be a whole chapter of a thesis. Then the other pieces - introduction, proofs, calculations, experimental design, testing, results, conclusion.
If you start writing bits of it as soon as you get your topic you'll have lots of writing done by the time it comes to publishing, and the challenge is more about editing it down and making it cohesive. Obviously you kind of do the work then write the results, and from there form your intro and abstract to review what you did, and the conclusions to discuss next steps and how to build on your research.
This approach scales from a single paper to a book, and it's mostly about being curious of the current state of the art in your field, building a habit for reading other papers, and figuring out where the gaps could be.
As an undergrad, you're not really expected to contribute new science, so it's fine to pick an existing method and paper and only change a little bit of it, your supervisor will have a better idea of where the bar is set on this point, and what you're expected to accomplish.
1. Join an existing research group as an assistant. This is more likely at a big university that emphasizes scholarship and publications. If you take this route, you'll probably have a small part of a larger project and your direct supervisor might be a postdoc or grad student.
2. Work on a complete project, either as an independent study or as an honors-level thesis. This is more common at an undergrad college like mine.
The advantage of (1) is that you'll be exposed to a higher level of research and get a better feel for what grad school is like. The advantage of (2) is that you get to take on the entire research project, including the lit review and writing.
In either case, the professor's research focus will play a big role in the topic of the project. The best advisor is one that you have a good relationship with and who has experience incorporating undergrads into their work. Prioritize that more so than the specific research topic. Think carefully about the scope of the project; a focused project within the supervisor's area of expertise is more likely to succeed. Trying to make up your own topic is probably a bad idea.
I have a few practical tips from previous thesis projects I've supervised:
- If you're doing a senior project, remember that you only have ~8 months, which has to include all the pre-research and writing. You need to be making progress every week. If you get stuck, seek help so you can get unstuck as quickly as possible.
- Schedule time for your research every day like a class. That time is blocked off and you WILL NOT schedule anything else during it. Work in brief, regular sessions. Don't binge.
- Keep backups of all your work, notes, and drafts.
- You may have to do a lit review, but don't get bogged down on it. I frequently see issues with students who try to read "every" paper and lose time that would be better spent on their actual research. You should have 2-3 key papers (ideally identified by your professor) that you work through in detail. You may add other papers, but focus your reading on quickly extracting key points and the context of the paper -- this is an important research skill to develop early. Set an aggressive limit on the size and scope of the lit review so you can finish it and move on to other topics.
- Be careful about projects that require hardware or complex system setups. You can easily lose a lot of time trying to get things to work.
- You might be able to publish something, but don't get hung up on that as an outcome. Posters are a great result for an undergrad project.
- The research question is the driver of the project. Make sure you clearly understand what you want to learn and how the design of your experiments/analysis relates to its answer. Some students fall into the trap of doing "research" that's more of a summary of an area, rather than an original investigation. Again, start with a narrow, carefully-scoped question; you can always broaden the scope if you have time.
I wrote a document for my own students on the thesis research process, suggested timelines, and specific writing tips for the sections of the final paper:
https://github.com/dansmyers/HonorsThesisGuide
Writing.
Writing is the hardest part.
Writing a lot is the only thing that makes writing easier.
Everything that postpones writing is easier and is not the real work.
Great researchers are great because they write a lot. Good luck.