Do you need help to pick a topic for your advanced degree?

The route to finding an answer is research. And that is what the advanced degree is all about.

My adviser, the former Vice President of the University of Houston, Dr. Rathindra Bose, rather preferred a student committed to going for the doctorate than one that only wanted the masters. The reason?, well, Dr. Bose wanted to find solutions to problems and that takes time and hard work. In this way, after you finished the course work, which takes around two years, you can engage and focus on research, 24/7, for a couple of years more. And there is no other way around. Because in good universities, the faculty tackle really important problems, like cancer, global warming, quantum computing, and others.

The problems do not need fancy or provocative names. One example is pollution with plastic. Stated like that, the problem is vast. An advanced degree can not tackle the entire problem. Thousands of advanced degrees might. And as you might already notice, it is not a one discipline problem, it is multidisciplinary, including natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering. For example, a question that needs to be addressed is:

• Should any plastic be allowed into production, or there should be a regulation to prevent the production of materials that do not count with an easy to implement recycling process?

What part of the question do you want to take? From the perspective of a political scientist, lawyer, businessman or businesswoman, more questions arise because if someone chooses to promote the regulatory path, a law needs to be approved. But do we want another law? Don’t we have enough problems already? Well, this is just to show you how complicated this issue is, and how naive we all have been, always persuaded by the apparent benefit of the new stuff. And by the way, is this a downside of capitalism? Would the market take care of the problem before it is too late?

In this regard, the link below is an example of an effort to reduce pollution in the making of composites in which plastic and biodegradable matrix from coffee are used to make parts for cars:

Check it out by clicking here

Now, think about all the stuff that we, in the modern world, use. The application of this idea is enormous and so the research needed because so many things are made with plastic and need to be replaced to mitigate our impact on the planet. Wait for a second, are you a philosopher, I hope you see how you too can work in this problem.

This is a very practical problem and we need everybody working on it.

Team Ingear