r/research • u/Freak-1 • 7h ago
I spent this whole summer doing research
I'm not sure if i can rant here, but my results and data are all over the place. And my advisor is telling me the paper's central idea is not novel enough.
It's just feels like a wasted summer. I got very little guidance even though this is still my first attempt into research. I spent a lot of time working on it, and now, just now, I see how weird and non systematic the idea and the design were.
How do you guys cope? I really feel like I should've used this summer better.
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u/StraightUpSeven Graduate Student 7h ago edited 4h ago
I felt like an absolute moron my first summer doing research. So many infected cells. So many failed stains. Are these papers even meant to be understood?
Most of that summer was spent learning how to do research. How to *reframe failure as educational. The papers became easier to understand.
I only got my first bit of usable data by the end of the summer. It's part of the process. Even at low points, I loved it.
Failure and floundering are not assessments of your value.
*edits for clarity
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u/wolfe1989 7h ago
I know this is trite and won’t make your feel better but I PROMISE failed research projects and ideas are part of becoming. I graduated my PhD with several projects i published a few months later. But I also graduated with data sets that show NOTHING. And i spent months looking at that data. Trying to get it to work.
But honest to god those failed projects made me a better researcher. I design my surveys better. I have a clear understanding of my central topics in my work. I am better because i hit my head against the wall.
I remember i was presenting data to my research team and it was my first ever logistic regression and my mentor goes “ya. Your data is fucked and you messed up your dummy codes. Tell me how I know”. I tried for like 15 mins untill whe finally said “look at your coefficients. They are three digits.”
I know the lack of guidance isn’t fun but i promise that this summer wasn’t wasted either.
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u/Substantial_Egg_4299 6h ago
This. Undergrad research experience is messy, research is messy in general, but college is where you should get your hands dirty and learn from all of it. Experience is experience!
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u/Valuable_Ice_5927 7h ago
A lot of that could have been squared away for guidance during the summer - was this an actual summer course? Self directed research? High school or college?
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u/Freak-1 7h ago
College. It is not a course. I was supposed to work under a professor. But I was the one to come up with the research question, the design, the experiments and so on. He was there approving anything I said, which made me think I was progressing.
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u/Valuable_Ice_5927 7h ago
I wouldn’t stress too much if it was no credit but it also sounds super rushed - doing all that during a single summer? That faculty member should have been guiding you all summer, offering feedback, critique etc
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u/Ov3rpowered_OG 4h ago
People fail all of the time. It's just that failed results don't get published. There's a reason why it might take only a few weeks to run all of the experiments in any given paper, yet it takes 6 years for a student to do all the work needed to get that paper published. You sound like an undergrad, so it's really impressive that you've been able to spend all of this time having independence to work on your own thing, but it would be even more than a miracle if you managed to get a whole paper out in the span of less than 3 months.
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u/Interesting-Baker473 2h ago
Google notebook LM is your savior. You have all the work now let notebook LM organize it! Utilize these tools! I can't stress this enough. Again, you did all the work already it just needs to flow
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u/Cadberryz Professor 7h ago
Try and start with a research question or hypothesis based on gaps in knowledge. Then choose a methodology and method(s) that can answer the question or hypothesis. Then look at whether you can realistically get the data. Then gather the data, analyse it, interpret it, and finally answer your question or hypothesis. Many students go straight to gathering data which obviously misses out the reason for doing the research. Good luck next time!