How to avoid feeling frustrated when facing with so much unkown knowledge?

[arielleon]

I am now a third grade undergraduate student. I do fair job in my studies. Now I have been in a theorectical condensed matter group in my university to learn how to do researches. But after a whole year, I still find that when I want to run into a topic, say Berry phase, or higgs mechanism, I always dig out endless materials. Sometimes I learn much. But in many case, I find myself lost in some "forbbidden" knowledge forrest and pay a lot of time but get to know nothing except some abstract terminologies. As this happens again and again, I feel really frustrated when facing something new. So I want to ask: Is doing research really that hard? Then how do physicists get into the field and seldomly feel bad? Thx a lot.

 

[fss]

You seem to view the fact that there's always something more to learn as a negative. Good researchers view it as a positive.

 

[arielleon]

You seem to view the fact that there's always something more to learn as a negative. Good researchers view it as a positive.

I love to learn new things. But I hate to be lost in new things. It seems that I spend a lot of time and learn little. And I wonder if this is a common thing or not when doing research.

 

[Choppy]

I'd say it's pretty common for a student - less so once you've been actively researching in a field for a decade.

In any academic writing there is a lot of assumed knowledge. If you don't begin with the premise that your audience has a basic understanding of your field, you'll end up writing a textbook in order to convey the small contribution to the field that you've made - which is incredibly inefficient.

One solution to the problem might be for journals to require a "student prompter" section in each of their puplished manuscripts, where the authors could point to various review articles or textbook chapters relevant to their work, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Thus you're stuck with approaching your supervisor and asking him or her for suggestions on material to cover so that you can better understand the papers you're going through.