research community

To be a successful researcher it's incredibly important to find and join your research community. Go to conferences (especially to small, intimate workshops), and get to know the other people who are working on the same kind of stuff. These people will be your lifelong colleagues: they represent a large part of the audience for your work, and being aware of what they're interested in and working on is crucial to choosing productive research directions.Research is about finding out things that are not already known, where an operative definition of 'known' is 'known to the people working in this area'. You can make big contributions by exploring blind spots in your community's thinking or by translating existing ideas from other communities, but this requires understanding the humans that make up your community and what kinds of things they consider known versus not known. Ultimately you're all collaborating in a shared endeavor, and to get the benefits of collaboration you need to know your collaborators. These are also the people who will judge your work: they'll review your papers, give feedback on your job applications and promotion cases, and recognize if and when you make a big contribution to the field.

Breaking into a new community can be difficult and intimidating, especially as a young student who feels like an imposter. It helps to remember that people want to see you thrive; in a good community the senior people will be nonjudgemental and encouraging of motivated but inexperienced students who put themselves out there. It's also a huge help to have an 'in': an advisor or research group you can hang out with to feel a sense of belonging and who can introduce you to others (it's much easier to feel included at a conference if you already have a default group of 'friends' to socialize with). This is deeply unfair to students at schools where these connections aren't available (and even to people like me who are at elite schools, but whose advisors just didn't cultivate research groups with this kind of collaborative, supportive culture), but such is life.

Like many grad students I was an awkward, nerdy kid, and thinking of research as a social endeavor didn't (and doesn't) come naturally to me. I wanted to understand the fundamental ideas; talking about the people developing them seemed like a distraction at best (and also just scary). I hoped I could go off by myself and, by thinking very hard, independently come up with new ideas that would revolutionize the field. It's important to recognize that this almost never happens; your network matters.

There is an opposite failure mode where you get too drawn into the internal debates and instrumental goals of your community and lose track of the real problems you're trying to solve. Some research communities really do lose the thread for years or decades at a time (the discourse is wrong), and you want to avoid joining such communities. But there's no way to be a successful researcher without participating in some community; as a young student, all you can do is to trust your own judgement and gravitate towards people whose work you respect.