what grad school's about

ph.d. programs have several aims: to give you a grounding in the history of your field, to teach you how to conduct experiments (if it's a science program) and how to think and write clearly, and to prepare you to create and manage your own research program.

some ph.d. programs (and here, i'm restricting myself to the domain of science ph.d. programs--the humanities are very different) place students on already-established projects where they conduct experiments on a small(ish) sub-topic of their advisor's larger research agenda, resulting in a dissertation. neuroscience departments and medical departments often work this way.

there are other ph.d. programs (like mine, for example) that don't assign students to already-existing projects. students enter the program, choose an area of study (e.g. psycholinguistics, social psychology, clinical psychology), and design their own research programs. the students come up with the hypotheses and (in conjunction with their advisors) design and execute the experiments that will test those hypotheses. notice that these programs require 1 or 2 steps that the programs described above don't: coming up with the hypotheses and designing the experiments.

in the end, it is surely the case that students in programs such as mine are better prepared to conduct their own research program, because they've been trained from the beginning to be part of every step in the scientific process, from coming up with an original, meaningful question to writing the final article describing the results and their consequences for the field.

howEVER. if you've never done this kind of thing before, it's hard. i feel like i'm flailing. the pressure to come up with that original idea, that original, IMPORTANT idea, that original, important, TESTABLE idea, is fierce. no one helps. the idea has to be yours. if you never come up with it, you never graduate. you fail.

in the process of writing this nrsa application, i'm faced with the prospect that my idea is not original, not important. i don't know why, but i seem to be unable to come up with the elegant theories that other students are able to come up with. my advisor seems not to know why i'm struggling. i often wonder how this grad school experiment will end...