One of my Google alerts is for the Atlas of Creation. Ever since receiving a copy myself, I've been interested to see where else it shows up and what the reactions are. Well, this morning's Google alert not only alerted me to another sighting, it introduced me to Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist, a blog I hadn't encountered before. It's written by Karina, a “[t]wenty-something grad student in ecology with aspirations to be a professor and lead foreign study programs.” She's blogging (more or less) anonymously from Big City, United States. I'll be adding her blog to my Google Reader collection, and I encourage you to pop by her site for a visit. It looks very interesting.
Oh, Karina, if you're reading, click through.
On Wednesday you posted about a question you asked in your population ecology class to which your professor responded, “That's an excellent question, and no one has modeled it. If you want to do this, you'd have a publishable paper. It could be a chapter in your thesis!” Your question was “Can you have a chapter in your thesis that has nothing (or little) to do with anything else you've done?” My answer is “It depends.”
It depends on how your graduate program is structured. If you were in my department, the decision would be up to you and your dissertation committee. Since the committee's opinion would be heavily influenced by your major advisor's opinion, the decision would be pretty much up to you and your major advisor. But that's my department. If you were my student, I'd leave the decision on whether to include it in your dissertation or not up to you, but we'd have a long discussion about whether including a project that was tangential to the main thrust of your dissertation research would (a) show how broad your expertise is or (b) distract you from getting the main part of your work done.
So I'd suggest that you first think carefully about how much time the project would take. Then you have to decide whether that's a good use of your time or not. I hope that you and your advisor have a good enough relationship that you and (s)he will help you make that decision. If you and he agree that the project makes sense, then you should make sure that members of your dissertation committee. You might also want to consider whether you could take on the project as a “side” project, i.e., a project that wouldn't be included in your dissertation, but that would lead to a published paper. In my department, it's not at all uncommon for students to do that, and I suspect that all three of my current students will have a publication or two from such side projects.
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