Yes and no. you might love dinosaurs and want to research all you can about any and all of them in any way you can. Focusing it down to just one narrow part of the field is stupidly limiting for such a desire. There's a reason most actual science got done by hobbyist scientists not as a job but as a passion project. The commedification of scientific pursuit has resulted in a lot of junk and fake science, sadly.Professor shelling out the harsh truths
A lot of scientists chasing research grants I’ve noticed. And a lot of research papers not worth the words on text, if they aren’t just completely fabricated AI generated stuff. Universities like to demand researchers publish a set amount of papers so they can use it as a metric when asking for grants or alumni donations.Yes and no. you might love dinosaurs and want to research all you can about any and all of them in any way you can. Focusing it down to just one narrow part of the field is stupidly limiting for such a desire. There's a reason most actual science got done by hobbyist scientists not as a job but as a passion project. The commedification of scientific pursuit has resulted in a lot of junk and fake science, sadly.
Nah bro needs the truth, MC has no redeeming factors other than being tangentially involved with a big titty gyaru. I used to feel bad for him but honestly all of his problems are his own fault.I know he thought he was saying the right thing, but he could've been a little less shitty about it.
I don't think the professor needed him to have a hyper-specific niche specialization in mind, but just literally anything beyond "i like dinosawsYes and no. you might love dinosaurs and want to research all you can about any and all of them in any way you can. Focusing it down to just one narrow part of the field is stupidly limiting for such a desire. There's a reason most actual science got done by hobbyist scientists not as a job but as a passion project. The commodification of scientific pursuit has resulted in a lot of junk and fake science, sadly.
I don't think the professor needed him to have a hyper-specific niche specialization in mind, but just literally anything beyond "i like dinosaws"
-I want to study how dinosaurs evolved
-I want to learn why the dinosaurs died
-I want to discover new species of dinosaurs
-I want to become an expert on Triceratops
-I want to manage the dinosaur exhibit at a museum
-I want to create accurate dinosaur models
etc.
Passion is crucial, but if you can't even clearly communicate what it is about the subject that fascinates you, then your passion is shallow. Which is a bad sign for people who want to commit time & money to grad school. The professor was right to try and sound him out on this one, fortunately Naruto took the right lesson from it.
Yes and no. you might love dinosaurs and want to research all you can about any and all of them in any way you can. Focusing it down to just one narrow part of the field is stupidly limiting for such a desire. There's a reason most actual science got done by hobbyist scientists not as a job but as a passion project. The commedification of scientific pursuit has resulted in a lot of junk and fake science, sadly.
He didn't squash his dreams. He applied the tiniest bit of pressure to them. If they were squashed as a result (they weren't, as we can see), then they weren't worth anything in the first place.Oof, that wasn't a very nice way to turn him down. The guy is finally learning to live his own life and have hope for the future beyond just making it through the month and the guy squashes his dreams just like that without giving a chance for him to even explain himself!
The least the old guy could have done was help him identify something specific to focus on, explain the different areas of the profession, the ups and downs, what sacrifices need to be done and help steer him into one direction, any direction, that he could choose in the near future. But shutting him down like that without even trying to understand his side?
Good thing he has a cheerful gyaru to help him rebounce, but that old man could very well have accidentally ended up turning him suicidal.
Well, prof is right though. Entering a grad school without reseaech in mind is just wasting time and money.Yes and no. you might love dinosaurs and want to research all you can about any and all of them in any way you can. Focusing it down to just one narrow part of the field is stupidly limiting for such a desire. There's a reason most actual science got done by hobbyist scientists not as a job but as a passion project. The commedification of scientific pursuit has resulted in a lot of junk and fake science, sadly.
You can be a general researcher paleontologist that doesn't specialize in one specific sub-field just fine. Just look at Stephan Jay Gould and what he was able to do.Well, prof is right though. Entering a grad school without reseaech in mind is just wasting time and money.
Grad school isn’t designed to produce ‘Expert Enthusiasts’ in a specific field; it is designed to produce ‘researcher’ in that field. Without any research topic in mind, you’ll be crunched to find any and all topic just to produce a dissertation for your graduation, or just waste time there until you run out of it and be forced to resign from the program.
It really is not enough to just think you like this field and you should continue to grad school of it. Speaking from personal experience here…![]()
That'd still mean you have a research topic in mind, right? Currently, Naruto seems to just want to enter the program and that's it - and that can lead to him having to scramble for a research topic later which is not a really good thing. If he start with topic in mind, or at least some idea what he actually wants to get out of the program, not just to enter and spend time learning about Dinosaur, that's a lot better start.You can be a general researcher paleontologist that doesn't specialize in one specific sub-field just fine. Just look at Stephan Jay Gould and what he was able to do.
I'm not saying specializing is bad, at all. As you said, having a specialization idea gives you an idea towards what research you want to do, but there's nothing wrong with just being a generalist, either. Delving deep in a specialization gets lots of knowledge within that, but unless it can get cross-connected appropriately then it's just as bad as a shallow knowledge pool that exists only on surface level and never deepens, either. Starting at the shallow lake of generalist knowledge and researching such, deepening one's knowledge further and providing that supporting base for deeper specialization knowledge is just as important as doing that specialized research.That'd still mean you have a research topic in mind, right? Currently, Naruto seems to just want to enter the program and that's it - and that can lead to him having to scramble for a research topic later which is not a really good thing. If he start with topic in mind, or at least some idea what he actually wants to get out of the program, not just to enter and spend time learning about Dinosaur, that's a lot better start.
Yes, starting with no topic or idea about doing research in mind doesnt always lead to bad result, but statistically speaking, it's a lot more likely, and Prof just try to prevent that.