A few notes from an article, forwarded to me kindly by Dr. Yost, about how to start finding your topic. (Hamida and Sitter, "Statistical Research for Beginners," The American Statistician, May 2004.
- As soon as a problem is stated, start right away to solve it;
use simple examples. - Keep starting from first principles, explaining again and
again just what it is you are trying to do. - Believe that this problem can be solved and that you will enjoy working it out.
A younger intern asked me the other day what my phd was going to be about, and it was the first time I had to try and complete some sentences. There are many days when I just want it to be about the varroa mite, or small hive beetle, or any of the pests harassing the bee population in Hawai'i. Dr. Ethel Villalobos is more like a cool aunt, than an advisor, but so what?
Yet, in an effort to remain practical and focus on the project I actually signed up for in oceanography, I am looking around.
My buzzwords have always been land-sea interactions, agricultural water use, fate and transport of nutrients in coastal waters. I know lots and lots about these things - but don't really know much about methods or the efforts by Science to investigate mechanisms. Being that Yost and Ruttenberg are both phosphorus folks, it makes a lot of sense to track a _single nutrient_, rather than vaguely looking at transport.
I was reading a paper about bioremediation this weekend, and it was more exciting than other things I've read recently. (I'll add the title in as an addendum later). While Dr. Ruttenberg is more focused on the microbial enzymes that allow phosphorus to be converted, I think I would rather study uptake by macroalgae and coral - and maybe I could be looking at the mechanisms that connect specific fertilizers or wastewater signals to uptake.
Either way, I hope to post more as I attempt to flesh out all this information coming my way.
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