Speaker 1: One of the hardest parts of science research when you're a student is choosing a topic. I have gotten so many questions asking, how do I find my passion? You know, I really like AI. How do I choose a science research topic for that? Don't worry. I got you covered. In this video, I'm making the most comprehensive guide and strategy for choosing a research topic. Hey there, my name is Rishabh. I'm a student studying neuroscience at Harvard, and this is my course on science research. This is video number two. So if you haven't already, be sure to watch video number one. The link to the playlist will be in the description and pinned comment down below. Now guys, this video is not for entertainment purposes, nor is this entire playlist. It's going to include all of the best practices that genuinely helped me answer questions that I was passionate about answering, as well as go and compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair or publish papers. Now, don't worry if you haven't done any science research ever before, or if you're already a seasoned pro who's attended ISAF, this video will have something for you. But first, let's start at the very, very beginning. My advice for you is to start consuming. This is step number one. I want you to consume all sorts of media, starting with Wikipedia. As such, I want you to go on Wikipedia, go in the search bar, and type in literally the first thing that comes to your mind. Let's say it's the word brain. On the Wikipedia page for brain, you're going to notice a ton of these blue hyperlinked words. And when you click on these blue words, it takes you on to the next page. For example, if I click on the word cerebral cortex and think, oh, wow, that sounds pretty cool, I'm just going to click on that. And I want you to keep going and going deeper and deeper down this Wikipedia rabbit hole. Now, while you're doing all of this, don't waste any time. I want you to start taking notes. I've created a full template step-by-step for everything that I'm going to go over in this video, including the notes template. So be sure to go down in the description. It's a free link. It'll take you to that. You can go ahead and download the template. So on these Wikipedia articles, I want you to write down words and subtopics. So literally just one to three words for everything that you read. If a word or subtopic or one of those hyperlinks sounds interesting to you, I want you to write it down in the template. For example, on my brain webpage, I might come across the word neuroplasticity. Let's say I'm, I don't know, a sophomore in high school and it sounds vaguely familiar, but I have no idea what neuroplasticity is. It does not matter. Add it into the template. This is going to create a list of potential topics and ideas for you to explore later. And we're going to get to the mind mapping stage where we're going to connect all of these together in just a second. Now, if you spend a few hours every day for like a week, I guarantee you you're going to have this huge list of topics and ideas. And it's going to seem kind of useless at first, but I guarantee you as soon as we start mind mapping, this is going to get really helpful. So it's now time to organize all of these words into categories. This is where the mind mapping technique comes in. And I'm sure most of you have seen a mind map already, but in case you haven't, this is what it looks like. It's basically a visual tool for organizing and connecting different ideas. And so to create a mind map, use the template I've given in the description below. Once again, it's on the same link I mentioned earlier. I'm going to show you what this is going to look like. You're going to put the general topic in the center and then you branch off ideas from it. For example, if I put brain in the center, I'm going to branch off neuroplasticity into a subtopic and then branch off from that with even more detailed subtopics. So you're going to continue to add on to this mind map as you explore further. Organizing your ideas in this way will help you see connections between different topics and narrow down on potential research areas. Now, ultimately, once you complete this step, you should have like 10 mind maps. If you've been doing a couple hours every day, you will have started at at least, you know, seven different for each day, seven different words that came to you initially, right? And so you should have seven different mind maps in completely different areas. But you should start to see where I'm going with this because you're spending hours just digging and looking at random words, trying to understand a little bit here and there off of Wikipedia. You'll naturally start to gravitate towards topics that you are more interested in reading because you're going to click on things that stand out to you. That's just how we work, right? If you see this blue hyperlinked thing for neuroplasticity, that triggers a little thought in your mind that, hey, I've heard of that word before. Let me click on that. Naturally, that is what you are more curious about and you're going to gravitate towards these subjects that you're most interested in. Now, most students will have a great time doing this, but I understand there's going to be just a couple of you who are left behind because you have no idea what to even put in at the beginning. Where I put in brain, you're like, what should I put in? Well, for those of you who are just completely lost, I want you to just pick off things that you've seen in your everyday life. I don't care what it is. If it's a MacBook, for instance, or I'm looking at these lights over here, LED lights. Type in anything that you see around you. At first, you might just toss those ideas away. But again, you'll start to gravitate towards hyperlinked things on those pages. There is literally people who do these speedruns on YouTube where they start on a singular word. They'll all start on the same webpage, and their goal is to come to a completely different webpage, something that has a completely different meaning within the fastest amount of time. So they'll start on the word LED light, and their goal is to get to brain in the shortest amount of time by just clicking on the hyperlinks and going page to page to page. Similarly, I want you guys to start on just any word that you see, and naturally, you will start to gravitate toward pages that are more interesting to you. The beauty of Wikipedia is that there's so many hyperlinks that you could get from Saudi Arabia to piano within like a minute if you choose to. So trust me, just choose any random word, and you will start to gravitate. If you do this for a couple days, a couple hours every day, you will accomplish this consumption step. Now it's time for step 1B, which is to continue consuming, but on a different medium. I want you to go onto the news and YouTube. So this is actually a pretty fun step. Now you have these mind maps. I want you to take words, subtopics, and ideas from that mind map and just search it up on Google. Literally just toss it in on google.com. I know there's going to be some garbage sources, but for the most part, there will be a few sources here and there that are actually interesting to read. You can even click on the news tab on Google, and it will show you news articles written by Times Magazine, New York Times. Read some of those articles. I guarantee you they will have hot topics that are interesting in those different ideas. For example, right now on my phone, I just searched up neuroplasticity, as you can see right here. And I'm going to go to the news tab. I just searched up one word, not even a question or anything. And as you can see, there's an article from Fortune. There's an article from Cleveland Clinic, an article from Times of India, an article from Nature, Psychology Today, that all talk about these different aspects of neuroplasticity. And they're not even that technical. I mean, the Nature one kind of is. It's kind of like a paper. But the other ones are pretty general. I mean, understanding our brain's ability to innovate, written in pretty high-level language that most of you should be able to understand, even if you're a middle schooler. So this is where you start to consume media. You can also do the same thing on YouTube. Now, the beauty of YouTube is that it has this AI algorithm that is just crazy smart. And it'll direct you to these videos that are honestly really cool to watch. They are a lot of fun. And that's how we find ourselves going on these YouTube rabbit holes, wasting hours just watching random videos about random subjects. But now we're not watching videos about random subjects. You're searching it up. We have a video from TEDx. We have a YouTube short from Dr. Andrew Huberman. I mean, it doesn't really matter what the source is. As long as it's somewhat interesting, you're learning a little bit, hearing new terms, and you're going to take notes. So the benefit of YouTube and I guess news in general is this will give you an idea of what the hot topics in these fields are. It'll also help you understand if certain things are interesting, right? If there's one video that is just like super mind-blowing to you, that's probably a good direction to start looking into. On the other hand, if there's a TEDx talk you're watching and you're like, yeah, I mean, I initially wrote down the word neuroplasticity, but now like I don't really care. They're talking about sleep. They're talking about all this stuff. Not super interesting. Then you don't have to dig deeper in that. Every day you should aim to read several news articles and watch a few YouTube videos and take notes in the template that I gave you. You can even subscribe to some science news outlets or some YouTube channels just like mine. But anyways, let's get into step number two. Step two is to start coming up with questions. Now that you've created these mind maps and started consuming media, some pretty questionable, I don't know what's on YouTube shorts these days. But anyway, you're going to come up with questions based off of this consumption. These questions will eventually help you come up with a research project idea. These can be super basic and open-ended questions, but there is one thing you should keep in mind. You should try to ask questions that are on higher levels of Costa's level house of questions thingy. And those are typically how and why questions. Those are the types of questions we associate with scientific reasoning and, you know, hypotheses and things like that. So you could ask, how does neuroplasticity affect the brain? Or how does sleep play a role in neuroplasticity? Or why does sleep affect the brain? You know, I'm just coming up with random questions here, but really anything works. The template will explain in depth, but keep adding to your list and just generating more questions. You can even use ChatGPT to help you ask some questions if you're stuck. ChatGPT is great with coming up with research questions, not so much science research projects or ideas, but it actually can ask some decent questions. Step three is to actually start researching. And for those of you who are seasoned pros with ISAF or have done some research in the past, this is where you guys are going to get to learn a little bit more because I have some cool techniques that I want to show you. Now it's time to dig deeper into these questions and come up with research project ideas. Literally, you can take the questions that you came up with on the template and put them into this website called typeset.io. This tool uses AI to take a research question and come up with a list of relevant papers for you to explore the topic. Let's say we want to search for papers on increasing neuroplasticity. Well, I'm going to head over to typeset.io, then I'm just going to type my question into the search bar. And as you can see here, it gives a list of papers organized by relevance. And you can even filter by date, journal, and other specific keywords. But overall, this tool is just super helpful in coming up with a list of good quality papers that are actually related to your research question. And these will give you a better idea of what potential research projects could look like in a given question. One of the most common questions I get is, hey, I want to do a research project on glioblastoma treatments, but what is that project? Well, this is where that step comes in. You know what you're interested in. You have a question that you might want to answer, but you don't know what projects might look like. And so this is where you can start to review what other researchers have done in the past to come up with your own question and your own research project. In my free template, copy the DOI link of each paper you find and paste it into the designated section so you can easily access them later. I also want you to make a one-sentence summary of what the research paper is about. Now, guys, I've actually tricked you because after you do this for a while, I've inadvertently made you do a literature review. A literature review is a summary and evaluation of what current research and knowledge on a topic is, and it's obviously a very crucial part of a research project. And you've basically already done half the work by using the previous steps. All you need to do now is just really expand upon those papers, which is why I made you put those links into my template. And so you can reference these papers later, expand upon your notes, and that'll give you a lot of knowledge about what the topic is. But before you do that step of the literature review, it's time to actually narrow down on a specific research project because you don't really want to spend a lot of time reading a bunch of papers and making notes about things that don't end up really being related to your research project. So how the heck do we choose a good research project, right? You may have some ideas. How do you know which one to do? Well, I can give you a bunch of mumbo jumbo and say, hey, you should have a really clear research question, a list of concise and specific research methodology steps, and you should have a good testable hypothesis, and you should have materials outlined and things like that. But let me actually kind of walk you through the thinking that I would have done or that I did when I was a high schooler student because I feel like it's a lot different as a student, right? We have limited knowledge. We don't have materials. Oftentimes we're not part of labs. So how the heck do we get to that next step? How do we come up with that specific research project that we can actually do? Well, here's the slightly unfortunate truth, which is we have to craft our project and methodology based on things that are actually doable as a student. And this is going to severely limit down what you can do. But this is why we went through the extensive work to come up with so many different ideas and so many different mind maps and questions and all that so that even if we eliminate 90% of those, we still have a couple questions and a couple projects to work on. You're mostly going to be crafting your project based on things that are actually doable for a student. And I know that's a little bit of an unfortunate truth because that means that 90% of what you came up with is going to get eliminated. But that's why we came up with so many so that even if we eliminate 90%, we're still good. We still have some questions that we can actually use. And so here's where it gets a little bit tricky because deciding things that are doable vary student to student. But in my experience as someone who won and competed at the top international science fairs in both middle school and high school, what I've noticed is that there's a general trend that is growing in science fairs and amongst high school researchers in general, which is to do quantitative oriented projects. That means that you have some form of data that you can analyze. Students are using statistical methods. They're using data analysis tools. They're using programming to analyze this data. And that's becoming increasingly popular in science fairs for high schoolers because it's actually doable by students. We can get our hands on data. We don't need to head into a lab, get extensive funding or whatnot. We can do those things by ourselves. It requires a lot of learning and hard work and perseverance. But we're able to do them. And so I think that's where things become doable. So to give you a little bit of advice on that. In mathematics, I've noticed that students, again, orient towards oftentimes those quantitative projects where they can hop on Wolfram Mathematica and work on differential equations and whatnot. Or in the data sciences is applicable to all those fields like plant science, animal science, astrology, whatever, right? But they typically will collect a lot of this data and then use statistical tools like RStudio, MATLAB, Python to analyze that data. In medicine, I've noticed the same thing. A lot of machine learning coming up in medicine with students using programming languages in Python or through MATLAB to create machine learning tools based on publicly available data sets online. And so this is all great work. Just I'm referencing a couple of things. One more thing is in engineering, I've noticed a lot of students are building budget techniques for various different devices. So for instance, things like 3D printers, developing more cheap, cost effective ways of doing that. Last year at ISEF, there was a winning project in biomedical engineering, and they developed like this cancer diagnostic test for like one tenth of the cost or something like that. Really cool research. And so as you can see, you kind of get an idea that, hey, students aren't necessarily getting thousands of dollars to their research. They're not going in labs, but they're able to choose topics that are actually doable. One other area that I think is a little bit interesting, it's something I kind of did my senior year of high school, is a little bit of theoretical research. So even if there isn't data available, as a student, you can kind of work on simulations. And oftentimes that requires like technology, sometimes it requires math, but oftentimes it's like technology tools, right? Which as I feel like Generation Z, we find like technology pretty intuitive. We're able to use these tools pretty effectively, learn them really fast at a young age. And so I'd recommend looking into, you know, trying to simulate phenomenon. For instance, my senior year, I worked on modeling glioblastoma growth, even though there's no data available for that. But I built a neural network that can do that based off of a mathematical model. And so theoretical work, you know, simulating data is also a really effective way to accomplish and answer a research question without actually getting your hands on something physical. But there is something that can help throughout all of this. I won't lie to you, you know, research mentor is incredibly helpful. Having one is, you know, great, because you not only get your questions answered more quickly, you can find the fastest way to do things for working when you're working on a science research project. But I feel like in general, you also learn the skill of like doing science and doing engineering, you become a better thinker. And just hearing, you know, your PI or hearing your mentor, you know, talk about how they would approach the problem, it kind of triggers something in your brain to think a little bit differently. And so I do want to help you guys, you know, seek mentors and get access to other research opportunities. And that is what the next video is going to be about. So that's going to be video number three of the science research playlist. But finally, I want to give you guys some free resources that will be helpful in your research. So number one is the Discord server that I've created for science research students. It's linked in the description down below. Join it. There are literally thousands of people just like you, or at least a few of them might be like you, like minded people that you'll be able to connect with and collaborate on projects and do a ton of cool stuff. Also, make sure to get the template. I made it specifically for this video, and it will be incredibly helpful for following along and actually doing this. It will be also in the description and pinned comment down below. Be sure to subscribe so you get notified for when video number three comes out. So just hit that red subscribe button down below. And lastly, I've been posting research opportunities on my LinkedIn page recently. So be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. I accept every single one of you students. So that link is also in the description down below. And with that, I'll see you guys next time.