On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 15:18, cjkogan111<cjkogan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hey Robert, > Is originality more important than usefulness when it comes to a > dissertation project?
Yes. If you want to do useful things regardless of whether or not they are novel, you should join me in industry instead of academia. :-) Again, is this a Master's thesis or a PhD thesis? If the former, there is often some leeway depending on the program; the goal may simply be to get you to learn something. If the latter, originality is almost always a prerequisite. It's just the nature of academia. It might not be the best fit for your goals, but that doesn't mean that academia should change to conform to your goals nor that you should conform to its. But you may have to reconcile yourself to doing what you think is most useful in your spare time, like many of us, rather than as part of your academic program. > It feels like I have to come up with something > obscure that hardly anyone is going to use to develop something that I > feel could be useful to a range of people. Secondly, I feel like this > topic is focused. I mean, I could start by just adding other > distributions to the statistics toolbox. I think that there is a wide range of things that you can do that would be quite useful while also being new. It doesn't have to be obscure to be new. Give me the ability to do something that I didn't know I couldn't live without. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
