Matty H.

Professors weren’t exaggerating when they said READ ARTICLES, particularly scholarly ones.

I’d like to add to this.

Read recent articles about a topic of choice, and be sure to check out the summaries, conclusions, and reflections.

Why?

They often point you exactly in the right direction by listing the implications of their own research and the gray areas/increasingly significant topics related to it.

EXAMPLE:

I just read a journal article called “The challenges of success: Future wolf conservation and management in the United States” by David E Ausband and L David Mech at Bioscience.

Near the end of the article were these delicious paragraphs, listing exactly the kind of topics that need more research:

These provide a sense of direction. They do for me, at least.

From here it’s a matter of introspection and narrowing-down to see which topics resonate the most.

For me, monitoring wolf dispersal/colonization patterns, particularly in the face of human expansion, is what I dream of researching. Predicting their expansion could be helpful to teaching society about coexistence.

Anyways. That’s the end of today’s entry!