Identifying your Interest
Whether you are interested in developing your own project or working with a professor on existing research and creative scholarship, narrowing and refining your interests is an important action to find the right project for you.
At this phase, it’s understandable to feel like you have some unrelated interests or are unsure if you can develop a research question. You might feel excited about beginning or overwhelmed at the possibilities. You don’t need to know all the answers (and no one does, nor would it be very interesting, if you did!). Direct your intellectual energy toward thinking about something you are interested in and that you'd like to learn more about. Ask yourself: What topics spark my curiosity? What do I care about? What issues/topics concern me?
Communicating Your Research/Scholarly Project Interest
Expressing your research or creative scholarship interest(s) can be communicated in a short summary of a topic or approach (method) that interests you. This brief proposal should be broad enough that several possible research questions or creative projects could come from your summary, while being specific enough to articulate clearly an area of focus.
Demonstrating the breadth of possible topics and approaches, UM faculty member project examples include:
- Using gaming practices and theories to deliver better course content
- Naming and reducing structural inequities for Indigenous communities in Montana and creating culture-centered public health care
- Finding and advancing the use of compounds to use as safe cancer treatments
- Studying the influence of landscape and habitat changes on aquatic systems
- Detecting and characterizing exoplanets
- Examining how people think about their own pasts and those of people with whom they are connected
- Delving into operational forest planning for multiple goals
- Evaluating fossil fuel industry messaging and studying the implications for climate and energy justice
- Analyzing artwork from the 17th and 18th centuries
Helpful Tips
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- What is something you care about? Maybe it is a course topic, an interesting article, a current event, a historical period, a personal lived experience, a skill or hobby, or even a random fact.
- Attend events in your department, on UM's campus, and in Missoula.
- Do some general reading on a topic that interests you. Find sources by following the references and endnotes cited at the end of research articles and books; talking with a librarian about your interests; asking professors for additional materials; and finding other articles or books written by an author.
- Write down and research questions and ideas that arise when you are learning about a new topic, reading primary literature, or going through your day. What new information or questions do they point you to?
- Don’t hesitate to look for interests outside of your major. Many fascinating research and creative scholarship projects come from interdisciplinary work that integrates ideas and methods from across fields in STEM, social sciences, art, and the humanities. Similarly, most interests could be approached from multiple fields. For example, a project could address responding to climate change through the lens of ecology, journalism, technology, business, political science, communication studies, psychology, or art (just to name a few).
- Spend time looking at the research areas of faculty members in your department. You might find specific projects of interest or find a field of research that's new to you.
- Are there research skills you are interested in developing or exploring given your current academic experiences? What about your professional interests after completing your undergraduate studies?
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The interests and ideas you’ve generated are important for greater learning and contributing to scholarship. Start to follow these interests and ideas to find out where they lead. You don’t need to only have one area of interest, but you might be feeling like you have too many. Here are some suggestions to narrow down your potential project ideas:
- Make a list of all your interests as closely as you can define them. Look for common themes and topics and see how they could be combined.
- Alternatively, look at your list and try to choose just 2-3 topics that most closely connect with your interests.
- Are some of your interests too far outside of your current skills and discipline? You don’t need to discard these ideas forever, but they may not be the best choice for your current academic situation.
- Are all of your interests suited to research or creative scholarship? Maybe one could become an independent study topic, another could lead you to a volunteer interest, and yet another could point toward a worthwhile reading list.
- If you are in a course related to your interests, arrange to visit your professor during office hours to share your ideas and invite suggestions for a possible project. Come prepared to this meeting with specific questions and an idea of what you hope can be some outcomes from the conversation.
- Make a project advising meeting with the Office of Undergraduate Research to talk through your interests!