Question: Do you prefer researching for your main or side project? Why?

Sam Parsons answered on 18 Sep 2017:

Hi Homer,

This is an awesome question, and it has actually given me a good moment to reflect on my own feelings about my projects. The short answer is that I am interested and enjoy working on each project that I am involved in for different reasons, so at times I prefer my DPhil topic, whereas at others I get much more excited about the side or newer projects that I am involved in. But, that answer feels like a bit of a lazy answer, so I’ll delve a bit deeper with an example from my main project, and a side project.

At the moment my main project is writing my thesis. This can be stressful at times, but it is based on work that I have poured most of my time and effort into this past three years, so I am very invested in it. The downside is that it gives me some fairly firm and tight deadlines, which typically of me, makes me long for those other projects that I am keen to work on (mainly as I am highly distractable). For example, last week, I spent a few days working on editing my thesis chapter of my first research study. Have you ever read something that you wrote two years ago? It really made me dislike my former self’s ability to write, especially when it came to some minor changes I had to make to the analysis programming script (although I won’t repeat the string of profanity that burst from me during that task). The positive thing is that I am much better now, but it felt a bit like taking a step back from something that was basically finished years ago.

One of my side projects is developing a small piece of software that can give researchers a robust estimation of the reliability of the cognitive tasks that they have used in their research, based on the data that they have collected. I am interested in this because the reliability of the task has lots of important implications for the statistical analyses that we perform. I’ll spare you the long and detailed explanation, but basically if a task is not that reliable (aka the data contains lots of ‘noise’), then the statistical analyses performed on the data are unreliable too. So, I have an important side project, that I am interested in ‘getting out there’, but, I need to leave it on hold until my thesis is finished, which gives me the sad faces.

So, I enjoy it all, but time issues and prioritising sometimes takes me temporarily away from the project that I am most excited about working on or finishing at that time. It reminds me of how my enthusiasm for History sharply declined as soon as I started needing to revise for exams, haha!
Thank you for asking this question, and I hope that this begins to answer it. If you have any follow-up questions, then please let me know. Hopefully we will meet in one of the school’s live chats 

Thanks,
Sam