Modern universities have two key functions: research and teaching. Teaching here refers to undergraduate and graduate coursework education. On the other hand, research refers to using the research experience or project to inculcate scientific values and the methodology of doing research and problem-solving. Naturally, research activities at a university are performed or conducted in a research lab.
At a modern university, professors must do research and teaching. The difference between universities is the relative emphasis on research and teaching. Some universities place more emphasis on research than teaching and vice versa. To do research, a professor must run a research lab. The key question is whether the research lab is funded by the university or through research grants obtained by the professor.
It may be a surprise to many that professors no longer have time to work on their experiments in his/her lab as their days are occupied by administrative duties, teaching, and research planning. Hence, most of the experiments are conducted by masters’, Ph.D. students and post-docs. Herein lies a perplexing issue for modern universities and professors to grapple with, and there is still no consensus on this point.
Specifically, the question is whether the research students and post-docs work on their ideas and research projects, or do they need to help the professor fulfil the obligations and research deliverables of the research grants obtained, bearing in mind that these research grants help maintain the lab in operational status. It is true that in academia today, around the world, the research grants are the engines and lubricants that run and power universities’ research labs.
My take on this issue is that graduate research is a training phase for the students, and it is very hard to come up with your own research projects. Thus, the students should pick a research topic that they like, and choose a suitable professor to coach them on this topic. During the course of their education with this professor, they will learn how to approach a research problem, devise a theoretically feasible solution, design the experiments and execute them, and interpret the results and troubleshoot the experiments. It is a journey in research, and the student will gradually evolve to be more independent, and require less coaching from the professor as the years go by. Hence, the solution is for the professor and student to work out a suitable masters, doctoral or post-doc project that is within scope of a relevant research grant in the lab, and learn about how to do research, and the experiment system under study.
Category: education,
Tags: research lab, research, teaching, student, research student,
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