Sitting here in the Collaboratory getting away from the roofing fumes in my office, I just sat down to write the 'Final Thoughts' section of my dissertation. I leaned back and looked at the ceiling to ponder. Then it hit me. The problem with my dissertation is not that it's too broad; it's actually pretty narrowly focussed. It focusses on fouling in seawater desalination by bloom-forming algae. Actually, just one algal speceis. The problem with that focus is that it's not broadly applicable. This is, I feel, one key to a PhD research project: narrowly focussed but broadly applicable. That's why the structure of DNA was such a good project. Or figuring out how to calculate an integral. Or how to make synthetic rubber. Those would have been good PhD topics.
So are there any more of those topics left? I guess one needs to be creative to find them. Hopefully they'll let me graduate with my non-optimal topic so I can work with future students on finding some NF-BA topics. Something to think about for the post-doc, too.
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