[zo7]

I feel it's pretty arrogant to think that you can contribute to research entirely on your own. You really need to be around other researchers who are smarter and more experienced than you to share ideas with and learn from, you simply do not have the insight needed to make progress in your field on your own. If you were that wunderkind who could do it, you honestly wouldn't be asking.

If you truly want to get into research, grad school should sound like a dream (at any school with a decent program, not just top schools). You'd be surrounded by likeminded people, get to do crazy science stuff all day, and you'd push the frontier of knowledge a little bit. It's really the best and most effective way to immerse yourself in the material and become a good researcher.

[wiresurfer]

This is not entirely true. Speaking from my rather long sojourn with CS Research in an industrial research lab setting. While it helps to start out with researchers, many fields of CS research are as much individual pursuits as they are a team effort. If you have a network of domain experts you can communicate with, and access to publications, a sufficiently motivated person can definitely make inroads into research. A couple of other points to be noted, 1. open access to publications is still a utopian dream. Being affiliated with an organization or academic institution gives you access. 2. Infrastructure and Equipment is something you will have to arrange yourself if you want to do things on your own. This is prohibitive when it comes to the latest and greatest in deep learning, or systems engineering or anything biomedical. 3. Data. Organizations have access to data. period. Or atleast can arrange access to data. 4. It helps to have more hands on deck. So working in teams can accelerate the pace of your results.

Some fields which are conducive to lone work would be around cryptography, algorithms, essentially anything theoretical CS. or fields like ICTD where its less about a break through and more about a novel application.

ps: this is a very CS perspective.

[rifung]

> If you truly want to get into research, grad school should sound like a dream (at any school with a decent program, not just top schools). You'd be surrounded by likeminded people, get to do crazy science stuff all day, and you'd push the frontier of knowledge a little bit. It's really the best and most effective way to immerse yourself in the material and become a good researcher.

Are you speaking from experience? It honestly sounded like a dream to me but many who have gone have said that many parts of it really suck because you have to do a lot of things besides research.

[slavik81]

Grad students usually teach so that they are paid, but you're not required to. Classes are required in my program, but only a handful. Your mileage may vary by university.

[rifung]

What about things like applying for grants though?

[beagle3]

I think the only source of potential arrogance is unfamiliarity with prior and ongoing work. My experience is that people often comes up, on their own, with brilliant ideas that have already been explored. A lot of my uni time was a roller coaster of "wow, I have this amazing idea" (talk to someone in the field), "bummer, they beat me to it by random (1,200) years".

Of course being around smart people helps think out, crystalize and polish ideas. But many people do have insights on their own, some completely new even in 200 year old fields.

[jey]

Plenty of people did exactly that before science became a professionalized endeavor. Sure, being in a community of practice, having experience guidance, etc would help a lot -- but by no means are they necessary conditions to do good research.