Thanks to the EUREKA program as well as my faculty advisor Dr. Kathy Foltz, I have been more than lucky to begin doing research as early as a first-year student at UCSB. I cannot deny the fact that research has taught me more than what I expected.

I agree with people who say that we learn things the fastest, and oftentimes unnoticed, when we enjoy the process of learning them. It has merely been three weeks into the research program as I begin to reveal what research really is about. I could be incorrect to make judgements now since I am barely even close to the surface of doing research. However, I believe one reason that we do research is because we want to and love to. Research is oftentimes about answering all those questions we have in our mind. Why this? Why that? In search for the answer to the questions, we do research.

Now, on our way to arriving at the answer, which we don’t even know if there is one (that’s something I find cool about research — “you never know what’s going to happen…guess we’ll have to find out!” as Dr. Foltz has remarked many times), we can encounter many things. For example, we learn so much more in addition to the answer we are looking for. From what I have heard when researchers share their experiences, these unexpected observations they learn are even more interesting than what they were originally intended to look for. Sometimes these observations become a groundbreaking research topic or a highly cited journal article.

On the other hand, there are times when researchers are not “making progress.” They just can’t get what they are hoping for. What’s even worse is that sometimes they do not even know what has gone wrong nor do they know how to fix the problem. With this being said, there is also the problem where researchers have to decide to continue or abandon their current project. While these problems can be difficult to overcome, they can sometimes be a very crucial component of research. They can be a lesson for the researchers, providing them with more experience on handling obstacles related to their research area. They can also be a warning, flagging the research project and really forcing the researchers to think if it is really worth their time and resources to proceed and if they would really obtain something significant at the end.

There is also another major part of research — the art of asking the right question. It’s all about asking the right question. If I were to compare research to a philosophical analogy, I would argue research is a journey with endless choices of what to do next and with no final destination. There are infinite questions we can ask about the world we live in, but some questions may be considered more “worthwhile” than others. In other words, some questions can be so empowering that we learn far more than we can imagine (but still enjoying the process!).

Yet, is there really the “right” question? Again, that’s something I find very intriguing about research — “I guess we’ll have to find out.”