Two of my ss who write their theses under my supervision have decided to apply for Lomonosov-2012, an international conference of students and post-graduates, held in Moscow State University. They could have been inspired by a success of another student of mine who presented the findings of her research at the conference last year.
The problem is, I think we don't have good chances this year. A thesis is supposed to be a research paper, but more and more students prefer a descriptive paper, where they compare various points of view.. and that's it.
I find it very hard to motivate students to do some more or less interesting and, what is more valuable, practical research, the findings of which can really be used. It can be partly explained by lack of subjects teaching them to do research, such as statistics.
If you work with university students, what do you do to make research findings practical?
- Evgeniya_Zimina's blog
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That's a difficult question. I'm studying terminology and my research is no way practical, it is a kind of "science for science's sake". I am interested in the subject, but it had been a problem to get motivated as I didn't see the point of getting my Candidate PhD in Russia (which won't even exist in two years), and my tutor can't understand what the problem is )) I was complaining about that to my colleague from India. I was asking for his advice. It was as simple as this: the thesis shouldn't be seen as a target or a practical thing, it's an intellectual challenge. It helped a lot - I stopped procrastinating ))
Maybe you should talk about the research work and give some examples of thesis titles and tell about their authors and outline the research topics that are up-to-date.
I work with university students an I also have some diploma students.My major is linguistics that's why the papers of my students are focused on language phenomena (wordformation, neology, language and culture).In case with linguistics topics should be up-to-date and it will make the research valuable as it dwells upon the things that either exist in the language at present time or have just emerged.
The department I work at is specialising in methods of teaching that's why quite a lot of graduation papers are devoted to new ways of teaching,its psychological or practical aspects.Students apply their methods during practice at school or with junior students at university therefore the results of their theses are undoubtedly practical.We also encourage them to issue manuals containing the essence of their research,strategy and exercises, and it's considered as an input to our library fund and everyday work and of course is rewarded with a bonus at the oral.
That's the whole problem- ss tend to like something really old-fashioned, a paradox, obviously! Modern topics frighten them, because they are afraid they may not be able to find enough materials. They are more likely to copy Barkhudarov than study latest things.:(
I presented at this conference last year and got a diploma for the best paper in the section. My research is based on language corpora. There is a lot of corpora available now, and these corpora include millions of real language chunks. As for practicality, I am not sure it's vital to know in what way the Russian and the English describe a human body, just to compare the world views.
My student. too, got a diploma and the right for publication. But she found it most rewarding when the chairman of the section told her it was the only realistic paper, concerning issues of real life.