If you have opportunity to work on a PhD thesis what would you work on? | Hacker News Reader

If you have opportunity to work on a PhD thesis what would you work on?

2 pointsavan17 comments

Recently i get this opportunity and i have some ideas too but none of them are really meaningful and have real impact on the world to make it a better place. BTW i'm developer and the PhD thesis should be related too.

View on HN

If you want to finish your thesis, the best advice I can give you is to select a topic that your advisor is already working on. If your advisor has already an area of interest, she probably, already has the dataset that you are going to work on. If not you would create that dataset for a future student, in either case your thesis will be part of a much larger picture. Also the importance of the frindship between you and your advisor cannot be overstated.

So in reality, choosing the right advisor is 10 times more important than choosing the right topic.

(I've adivised over 10 thesis, and reviewed several more)

Treat with care. I've seen people follow this advice and get severely burned out because neither the student (working on a subsection) nor the advisor (working on a larger project) was as interested in the topic of the thesis as both would be if a separate topic was chosen.

Thanks for your advise, i get that advise that work on something you can finish from everyone have experience in PhD but then it should be too easy and meaningless i guess (i know even the easiest one would get at least 3 years) and yes i don't want to jump in another black hole (or rabbit hole at least). Thank you again i would noted that too.

Ontology-driven low code. Revolution in application software. Something like that.

Thanks a lot I'm not familiar with Ontology-driven architecture i would read some papers and articles about that to get familiar.

See "model driven architecture" except (1) that is trademarked, (2) that vision is not quite realized in the standards that have been published, but has come closer to realization in some proprietary projects.

If those ideas were fully realized and brought to the people the impact would be huge.

That's exactly what i wanted to work on a meaningful thesis. thanks a lot i will read them and talk to advisor about that topic. Thanks a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com