In this video I will show you three subjects which every PhD student must take before starting
their research and Why?
If you are only interested in knowing the names of these subjects, I have written here
and you are welcome to skip this video but if you watch this video full I am confident
that you will learn few things so let's get started after a short break!Hello and welcome
to my channel.
My name is Tahir and if this is your first time please hit the subscribe button and also
the notification bell to get notified whenever I post a new video on this channel every Tuesday
and Friday so before we talk about why you need these subjects, I would like to discuss
the coursework there are various rules for coursework some universities ask you do the
coursework in your first year or even in your second year and some universities allow you
to do the coursework any time you want and you can take any subjects here in Australia
if you a PhD student, you can take any subject whenever you want I am not a big fan of coursework
because in my opinion it wastes a lot of time the names of the subjects in your coursework
might look relevant to your PhD but in fact you will be wasting time and having said that
these three subjects in my opinion are still very important for you to take during this
coursework or during first or second year of your PhD degree I will be explaining these
subjects in this order but I would like to request you to put in the comments which subject
in your opinion is most important even if it is not listed in this list so I would appreciate
that and I would like to learn something from you so let's talk about the first subject
so this subject has many names sometimes you might find research design sometimes you might
get research design and methods or research design and methodology essentially the subject
is same when you start your PhD, so how this subject helps you so when you start your PhD,
you have a broad field then you do some literature review what other researchers have done then
you try to find your research topic you write a research proposal now what you are trying
to achieve here?
you are trying to formulate your research questions.
what questions your research will be answering? for example why something is happening?
what is going on there?
what is the relationship between any two factors or any two variables? so these kind of questions
are the questions which your research will be answering so this subject will help you
in many ways and those ways can be summarized in two simple sentences so the first thing
is the subject will help you to make a research plan and the second thing is it will also
help you to make a research strategy which method to use?
there are many methods whether you will be doing experiments whether you will be doing
surveys whether you will be conducting interviews or doing some case studies or using just the
historical data so what you are trying to achieve?
how you are going to achieve this? so all this you will learn in this subject so these
two important things how to plan your research and how to chose a method this you will learn
in this subject you will also learn how to formulate your questions what questions to
ask for example if you are conducting surveys which questions you should include in your
surveys which experiment you should do and how to collect data?
what is the best method to collect your data? all these questions will be answered by this
subject.
your plan, your research methods, your questions, everything related to planning of your research
now let';s talk about the second subject which is statistics now once you get the data you
got some numbers in front of you a lot of numbers these numbers have no value until
you get the answers to your questions so how to get the answers to your questions?
how to prove to someone that you were right even if you were wrong you can still get the
degree don't worry about that but how to do that?
statistics will help you to get your answers from the numbers to the answers statistics
has some very powerful tools for example I will start from a very simple example you
all are familiar the power of the normal distribution the bell-shaped distribution the variance
analysis, linear regression, hypothesis tests, parametric tests, correlation between the
variables.
So all these powerful tools you will get from statistics and these tools will help you get
the answers from your data before I talk about the last subject, I want to discuss one more
thing that is a small part of a branch of science which is called "Data Science".
I am not a big fan of this Big Data thing because in my opinion this is just a pile
of rubbish however I like two very important parts of this data science branch the first
part is how you can tell a story from your data? and this is not for you not for PhD
students this is for those people who are working in the corporate sector they must
know how to tell a story from data now the second part is for you, for PhD students and
that is how to showcase your data?
If you have learned statistics with love with passion, you already know how to showcase
your data because this statistics will show you how to showcase your data but if not then
you can search for this keyword you will find a lot of videos on YouTube , I might make
a video later on this topic "Data showcasing" data showcasing, I love the most because this
helps you how to present your data in front of researchers, in front of scientists, in
front of analysts, in front of engineers, when you are publishing your work, you have
to present your data in front of this community and data showcasing techniques will help you
to do this to present your data in a wonderful way so therefore you should learn this as
well if you are not a big fan of statistics.
Now let's talk about the last subject I have listed here its "Linear Algebra" In many situations
when you are doing research you will end up having some vectors or matrices, in front
of you now when you are handling vectors or matrices, you will need this subject This
subject is a very complex subject but the good news is that the basic elements of this
subject are very simple and straightforward you can easily lean this now for example in
few fields, you end up having a large numbers of variables which are linearly related to
each other so you get a linear equations may be hundreds of linear equations so in this
situation, you can find a functional relationship between them by using linear algebra techniques
there is one very powerful tool in linear algebra which is called SVD Singular Value
Decomposition.
This is a technique which almost every researcher use during their PhD it is such a powerful
technique and this technique can reduce the complexity of your data it reduces the redundancy
and noise you can reduce the dimensions of your data so this SVD can lead to another
technique which is called Principal Component Analysis and that technique is a very powerful
technique in machine learning so this subject is also very important in particular for engineering
related fields so these were my three picks for you so I hope that you like this video
if so, please give it a thumbs up thanks for watching and see you next time.