Research Improves All Of Our Lives
Valuing Research Part I: My Circuitous Journey from Soldier to Electrician to Engineer to Author to Researcher
Welcome to the gazebo! Take a seat. I’m honored you’re here!
Ed Note: This is the first of a multi-part series on the value of research. Today’s part talks about how and why I became a researcher. Subsequent parts will discuss different types of research, explain why research journal articles are so uniquely structured and boring, and present examples of how past research has changed all of our lives. I hope you will learn to critically think a little like a researcher.
Given the drastic cuts that the current administration is making to research across the board, I thought this topic took precedence over the business planning track we were originally on.
If we are not careful, we could find ourselves decades behind the rest of the world’s countries, including our major competitors. Speaking for myself, returning to the “Dark Ages” is not something I would look forward to.
We will return to business planning after this series is completed. I hope you find it thought provoking and that you become more aware of the precarious state of future research. Let me know.
This Week’s Summary:
An important goal of education is fostering curiosity
Curiosity stimulates questions that warrant researching
Research is highly creative and does not happen in a vacuum
How my Y2K book nudged me to become a PhD researcher
Academic work develops critical thinking that separates fact from opinion
Opinions aren’t facts no matter who says or repeats them
Do you know someone who is going to college while also working full time and/or has a family? That was me. In the mid-1970s, I was a returning Army veteran who took advantage of both the Federal GI Bill, which offered a little money for living expenses, and the Illinois Veteran Tuition Assistance program, which picked up tuition at a state school (University of Illinois Chicago Circle1 in my case). Without these benefits I don’t know if I would have been able to complete my engineering undergraduate education.
Veteran education benefits were important then and are arguably more important today and should be jealously protected for current and future veterans. But I digress … this may become a future post. Remind me if I forget to cover it, please.
Why did I choose engineering? The short answer is that I wanted to know more about how the physical world worked. Why didn’t bridges fall down? Why did the lights turn on when I flipped a switch? This all seemed miraculous to me, and I wanted to understand how it all worked. I guess, it was curiosity, more than anything. Curiosity has been a common theme throughout my life, and it was the Y2K bug that made me seriously consider following my curiosity and becoming a PhD researcher. I never would have seen that one coming. You will see.
Image by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.
UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE ENGINEERING YEARS
Back in my undergraduate days, my circumstances were such that I had to support myself through school so those years were a blur of working 30-40 hours per week in bars, on loading docks, making cabinets, renovating houses, and anything else I could do to make enough money to eat and pay the rent. The rent got paid, but sleeping and eating sometimes took a serious hit. This is where my social network came into the picture, and I will be forever grateful to those who fed me every now and then. I am still trying to make up for the loss of sleep! :-)
I don’t know how I did it, actually. I was taking a full-time engineering load and barely getting by with passing grades until my senior year when my finances allowed some breathing room. I was a solid “C” student with the occasional “B” or “A” which was fine with me. I was committed to getting my degree and was getting there, course by course. That said, survival was high on my list, and I did exactly what I had to do to get my electronic engineering bachelor’s degree, and not much more. I just didn’t have the bandwidth.
I see this drive and stress in many of my adult students today and respect them more than they could know.
Through a set of unlikely circumstances, I was offered the chance to work as a Graduate Research Assistant for one of the UICC professors. This meant not only that my graduate school tuition would be paid but I would also receive a modest income that would cover my bills. I took it!2
My first day on the job, I met folks who were working on their master’s degree (as I was) and a few doctoral candidates who already had their master’s degree and were working on their PhD. They were sort of mythical creatures to me then because they always seemed to be working on really esoteric stuff that only they understood. I wondered if I had what it took to get my PhD someday, but eating and making some money were still my most important priority.
In time, I completed my master’s degree and moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley to work selling advanced technology to engineers, which was good work, but I continued to toy with the idea of getting my PhD someday. In retrospect, my continued interest came mostly from an intellectual challenge just to see if I could do it combined with my interest in learning more about how things worked.
MY SILICON VALLEY, AUSTIN MBA AND BOOK AUTHOR YEARS
After about 10 years working in the “The Valley” as a sales and marketing manager, I decided to round out my business background and returned to school to get my Master of Business Administration (MBA) from The University of Texas at Austin. Here again I toyed with the prospect of pursuing a management PhD but did not. Instead, I started a consulting firm that became a software training firm that I eventually sold to a competitor before moving back to Chicago. It was during this time that I began seriously writing books and articles, starting with technology topics and eventually adding management topics.
This is the time when I wrote my “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting Your Own Business,” “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Business,” “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Personal Finance with Quicken,” “The Technology M&A Guidebook,” and “Inside Cisco” books. This was an amazingly formative time for me as a writer and I will always be grateful to the editors and publishers who I worked with during this time.
HOW Y2K KINDLED MY INTEREST IN GETTING A PhD
Oddly enough, the book that prompted me to seriously consider a PhD was my “SAMS Teach Yourself Year 2000 Crisis Survival In 10 Minutes” book. What! You may be asking yourself? A SAMS book? I get it, and this fact sometimes surprises me too. Let me explain.
For those of you who recall the time leading up to Y2K (the Year 2000), it was full of all kinds of opinions, judgements, paranoia, and doomsday prophecies that many folks were taking seriously. I recall driving to Indianapolis to meet with my publisher when I listened to a radio program that talked about how “The End Was Near” with Y2K and got a little pissed. This was a technology bug that was related to computer memory initially being set up to store the year as two digits (i.e., 56) instead of four digits (i.e., 1956) and that was it. There wasn’t anything mystical about it, as many of the opportunists who were capitalizing on the hype would have folks believe.
The Y2K bug was happening because early computer memory was extremely expensive, and software developers chose to store only two digits instead of four as a way of making the most efficient use of the memory that they had. What they didn’t think about at the time was that 50+ years later, the Millennium would arrive and a 2005 birthday could then be mistaken for 1905 birthday and a newborn baby could be represented in the computer as being 100 years old, or vice versa! Needless to say, the medical treatment of the two would be radically different and could be dangerous.
This simple two-digit/four-digit mismatch had the ability to create havoc across society from medical care, to insurance, to electrical grids, to billing systems, to airplane navigation, and so forth. It sounds like it might have been trivial, but it was actually a big deal … but it was a technologically big deal and not the end of the world. When I met with my publisher and expressed my outrage at what was happening, he agreed, and committed to publishing a Y2K book if I wrote it.
Y2K is now thought of a blip in time, but it could have been a major issue if the people of the world had not collectively spent nearly $1 trillion fixing the bug before the clock ticked to the new millennium. It is a great example of the powerful stuff we can accomplish if we work together toward a common goal instead of trashing each other.
MY Y2K BOOK FORCED ME HOW TO THINK LIKE A RESEARCHER
Here is where my PhD preparation comes back into the story. Given that there were so many opinions floating around about Y2K, I decided to write the book based on referenceable facts that anyone could check out for themselves.
Each chapter was on a different topic, but they all shared the same basic structure. 1) First there was an explanation of the problem. 2) Next was how the Y2K bug affected this problem area. 3) Next was how ready this particular industry was for dealing with the Y2K bug. 4) Next were my overall conclusions from having analyzed the situation. 5) Finally, I offered what readers could do to prepare themselves for the arrival of the new Millennium.
Importantly, each chapter was fully referenced to the sources that I used in preparing my analysis. In other words, I offered my analysis of accessible information so my readers could read for themselves if they chose. This was not just my opinion. It was my “informed analysis and conclusions” based on what I considered the most credible and accurate information at the time.
If you have been reading my work, this should feel familiar. This is how I write most of my work here at the “BizDoctor’s Gazebo” and usually at the “Grifter Chronicles.” I prefer to treat my readers as though they are fully capable of making up their own minds when presented with accurate information and not just sensationalize an arbitrary data point out of context which would make it “a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Shakespeare, Macbeth) We all get enough of that from any number of online sources that bombard us every day.
Learning how to separate opinion from fact is an dying critical thinking process that will be a topic for a future post. Opinion is not objective, verifiable fact, no matter who says it and no matter how many times they repeat it. Gravity just doesn’t care who believes in it or not. It just is - a fact.
Bringing this back to the PhD, I realized after writing my book that I had written the equivalent of a “light PhD dissertation” with my Y2K book, and really enjoyed it. Plus, the feedback I got from folks at the over thirty Y2K events I did in 1999, and by testifying before Congress, was that people really appreciated being treated as thinking adults who could read and interpret things for themselves. They also appreciated my helping them better understand the topic so that they could live better lives. I had found my home.
Image by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.
RESEARCH DOESN’T HAPPEN IN A VACUUM - IT BUILDS ON OTHERS
Next time we will look at how this structured approach to research and information sharing has offered us amazing societal evolution that will stop should the USA decide that research is no longer valuable. Why is this important? Think about the next generation of medical or technological advances that we all intuitively expect will be coming, but will never exist, because a few ideological zealots in power decided to turn off research funding. Poof. Gone. No kidding. This is truly harmful stuff happening right before our eyes. Until next time …
Thank you as always for stopping by. Peace.
It means a great deal to me that you took time to stop by today and read this week’s newsletter. I hope you got value from it and if you did please comment and/or share the BizDoctor’s Gazebo with a colleague or friend. Ed
UICC is now the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Same great school.
He attached some strings to the offer which I was able to successfully resolve, which might be a topic for a future post.
Great Article, Ed!
Dave