I will try to catch up with my Phd Cliche of the Week posts. I didn’t do a good job of committing to that section of my blog. I find Phd Comics (Piled Higher and Deeper) to be a good inspiration for such posts. So, here is a cliche inspired by the strip above. Clicking on it will take you to the site for other strips.
One of the many nightmares of a Phd student is to find out that the topic she is working on has already been done. It may take just one publication to void your research efforts. All those sleepless nights trying to shape up your ideas, come up with something new, and fantasizing about the day you will leave the grad school may be buried down if you come across one paper that described the research in your mind.
I over dramatized the situation above a bit. The process of qualification exam is a way for one to make sure that a literature survey in the area of research is done, and the field is understood before declaring a Phd topic. A thorough literature survey is not only necessary to understand the previous work done in the research field, but also for making sure that the topic is novel. It is highly possible that one would come across a publication that has similar ideas to the desired research topic as a result of a good literature survey. However, it is still not guaranteed. One day a situation illustrated in the comic strip above may be experienced. Is that the end of the world? Even if it is not the end of the world, it would definitely feel like so.
The damage would depend on which stage this happens. If it is the literature survey stage, it is fine and may be even useful to shape up the ideas. However, if it is just before writing the dissertation, it would suck very badly. It would mean new experiments, case studies, or different analysis methods, or a whole new interpretation of the results.
I am sure many grad students are hoping that nobody comes up with better results in their area of research before they write that dissertation and tells them to move on to a new topic.
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