I am SOOO stressed. I need to talk it out.
I am in the middle of my research proposal. I am SO tired of crawling through ACM and IEEE and SpringerLink and so many other journal databases just looking for my “jackpot paper” as one of my professors called it.
I started out thinking it would be so easy to propose. There are so many problems out there just begging to be solved by Computer Scientists (hehe) like me. I decided to tackle health problems, and I was thinking of ZCMC (a public hospital from my hometown) and the myriad of problems the doctors have there (lack of tools and too many patients). So my first idea was to create a program to make doctor-patient communication more convenient, thus a remote patient monitoring system. Sounds like a potential app, right?
I submitted that proposal but got lots of negative comments, like the idea being so old its worn off its soles already. It didn’t matter that ZCMC did *not* have that app nor needed it quite badly, what mattered that it already existed (many versions of it in fact) in the world. So I had to prove that my idea was new. Not only that, but I also had to solve a computer-related problem at the same time, or else my thesis would be rejected for it not being “under the CS domain”.
Uuurgh. This is so complicated. I thought I was taking Computer Science so I could solve real-world problems! That’s what I really want. But no, it turns out I have to solve a Computer Science problem using Computer Science. That’s irritating me!!! I don’t wanna solve a Computer Science problem because those kinds of thesis aren’t usually USED. They just get published. Because only really really great solutions get used, and I think maybe the folks at Google have got that covered already.
*sigh* So now I’m taking a look at Human-Computer Interaction, which is a field directly under the CS umbrella, but at the same time I can see it solving a lot of real world problems. Think Apple and the iPhone. But my professor says that I have to be careful in formulating my research proposal because I have to defend it being a CS problem (as opposed to an HCI prob… hayayay).
Computer Science is so complicated. Why am I even in this field??? (I should just stick to blogging about Youtub. Gahhh!)
