Diving into the “Scholarly Conversation” and Other Tips on Academic Writing

Posted on by Advik Eswaran

A blank Google Docs document.
A blank Google Docs file, with academic writing potential as of yet unrealized.

Every student at Princeton lives their own unique experience, but if there’s one thing all Princeton students have in common, it’s that we all need to know how to write academically. The only required class for all Princeton students, first-year writing seminar, is a rite of passage. Later on, students of nearly every single major must complete independent work, writing their junior papers and senior theses; when writing these, knowing how to effectively communicate your findings is an essential skill. Here, I’ll talk about some strategies for getting a handle on academic writing, which I hope you’ll find useful!

Continue reading Diving into the “Scholarly Conversation” and Other Tips on Academic Writing

Field Research on the Juneau Icefield: Living the Emersonian Triangle

Posted on by Advik Eswaran

A Terrestrial Radar Interferometry (TRI) station overlooking Echo Glacier — a field site used by NASA as an analog environment to the moon Europa.
A Terrestrial Radar Interferometry (TRI) station overlooking Echo Glacier — a field site used by NASA as an analog environment to the moon Europa. Photo credit: Advik Eswaran.

Students across a variety of disciplines (or fields, if you will) have the opportunity to perform fieldwork at Princeton. In contrast to lab work—which involves performing experiments or analyses within a controlled on-campus environment—fieldwork takes place, well, in the field. Researchers venture out into the wide, wild world in pursuit of somehow collecting useful data from the vast webs of chaos that surround them. In my home department of the Geosciences, fieldwork is the norm: students go out to geological field camps or embark on oceanographic cruises to gather data about the raw Earth that surrounds us. However, fieldwork is truly possible in any discipline.

This past summer, I conducted my own fieldwork as part of the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP). For two months, I lived and conducted glaciology research with about 40 other students, staff, and faculty on the glaciers of the Juneau Icefield—an interconnected system of over 140 glaciers spanning 1500 square miles across southern Alaska and northern Canada. It was one of the most incredible—and intellectually rewarding—experiences of my life. Here, I’ll share some stories from my time on the Icefield, contextualizing them within some broader lessons I learned about how field research operates.

Continue reading Field Research on the Juneau Icefield: Living the Emersonian Triangle

Surf’s Up: A Guide to Internet Surfing, and other Assorted Browsing Research Skills

Posted on by Advik Eswaran

This image depicts a Google search of "What is research," which symbolizes the purpose of this post—i.e. figuring out how to research online.
What is research? Perhaps we can ask the Internet…

If you’re anything like me, you first thought that “research” essentially amounted to surfing the Internet. Back in the glory days of middle school, “research” meant the rewarded privilege of getting to use the laptop carts, productively using class time on googling information about our various project topics (and definitely not secretly playing games). Now, as the mature, worldly college student you now are, perhaps you think you know better. “True” academic research, the clever reader now knowingly tells themselves, is historians dusting through archival documents and scientists mixing frothy chemicals in the lab. 

Yet there’s a missing part here: a crucial element that takes us back to our elementary and middle days of excited googling. To make any significant intellectual contribution to any field, one first has to understand the current state of knowledge in that same field. To borrow the term favored by the Writing Program, we need to understand the scholarly conversation. How do we know if we’re making a contribution to something, if we don’t understand what that something is? Understanding the current state of research in a given field is a crucially important skill—really, a prerequisite—for conducting your own effective research in that field. 

Continue reading Surf’s Up: A Guide to Internet Surfing, and other Assorted Browsing Research Skills