Sunday 30 November 2008

Moving toward PhD title: Keep pushing II

The other problem preventing students from moving efficiently towards the goal is an „illness” of concentrating on some kind particular idea that results in producing constantly the same result in a sort of cycle and permanent attempts to push it into different conferences. Like a donkey travelling always toward a carrot been fixed a meter from his nose.

It is useful to fix all ideas somewhere (for example in the old way on a paper) after you have generated those and then attempt to distance from it by asking yourself “what else can be invented?” This will allow you continue thinking as we need to generate a bunch of ideas rather than stop and concentrate on one (which can be potentially wrong or incomplete). In the worst case (you were not able to imagine anything better) you can always return to the fixed idea and continue developing it.

Generating ideas, it is important to invent alternative solutions one after another as long as you got a creative thinking flow. If new ideas don’t popup in your mind by themselves any longer you could use the basic mathematical combinatorial search approach to find new: each topic can be evolved by either a deeper research of different parameters of it or widened by replacing some properties of it / applying the topic to new subjects.

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