What are some art/craft ideas?

What should I do if my advisor dictates all his research ideas and never pays attention to any of my ideas to follow?

• I am doing a masters degree in the field of computer science and pursuing a funded project. As usual we have weekly meetings with my advisor where we discuss the current state. The problem is, he always care about his ideas about what to do next. He generally does not listen to my own ideas and when he does listen exceptionally, he tries to prove why my idea is 'useless' and should not be investigated further. I don't feel like I gain a feel of how to do research, where to look as all th things should be done is dictated in this weekly meetings. All I am doing is writing scripts and coming up with results documents. The sad thing is, I don't even have enough space to try my own ideas as he generally suggests to investigate a lo of thing in a very limited time What should I do? Is that normal that advisors do not care about others' ideas? Should I talk this with my advisor or go on feeling like a supervised script and document generator that is enough to complete a Masters degree? PS: I have always wanted to be an academics in my life, and do care for research a lot in my life.

• Answer:

  My experience is that such situations are a constant in research. My working relationship with my first adviser fell apart in part over an idea I had and was really passionate about. It brought mathematics, physics, and chemistry all to bear on the common, broad problem of estimating orientation-dependent quantities of symmetric objects from sparse information. I consider it my best work by far. Of course I'm still passionate about the idea and still have concrete plans for how I could have built the method out into at least a solid Ph.D., automating construction of sampling sets for arbitrary symmetries, getting the thing into one or more of the production open-source electrodynamic simulation engines, and importantly, applying it to one or two splashy science results to popularize it. You can read about it here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp300621q My first boss didn't care, and we had a rocky time together, fueled largely by the amount of time I spent working on the project and not on his bread and butter. (Note the asterisk by my name: I had to be my own corresponding author because he recused himself from that role.) My new bosses don't care, either, even though I get along great with them. They just politely change the subject when I bring it up and patiently wait while I rant and get my frustration off my chest once or twice a year. Neither has the community: my co-author and new co-boss threw in a pity self-citation in an unrelated work of his, and otherwise it has never been cited. Your adviser probably knows that this may happen with your idea. You probably know your idea better, but he probably knows fashion better, and fashion matters for your professional survival as much as his. Research is a fashion business. It is really satisfying to execute on your own idea. But executing on a popular idea gets you past the editors and peer reviewers at high-impact journals, it gets you citations, and most importantly, it gets you funding. Without funding, your career ends very quickly, and after a career change out of research, you will probably be even less able to pursue your idea. As a Master's student you probably have to suck it up and fall in line because the degree is so short. There just isn't the time. At the doctoral level and beyond, the pattern I see is to maintain a robust research program in a fashionable line of research to keep the lights on and to poach free scraps of time and money to chase your own curiosity. I don't think this goes away, either: tenured professors themselves have these ideas and curiosities and also seem sometimes to show frustration in allocating resources to big-money high visibility projects, even when those projects aren't the ones they're most excited about. They have to answer to grant committees and write high-impact articles, or they won't be able to attract money and talent, which starts a death spiral. In my own Ph.D., I pushed out a little stub of an idea I really loved, while making several honest, incremental contributions to some popular lines of research that drove citations and funding and are helping to pay the bills in the labs I worked in. That doesn't seem so bad. I found that splitting my research time in the requisite way requires an extraordinary level of energy and motivation. It goes beyond my own energy level, so I'm saying goodbye to research instead of continuing the struggle. But these days I feel less a failure and more like I had a short, successful career in research, concluding on a positive note when I finished my degree. I wish the same for you.