Drilling into what it means to be a scholar, irrespective of whether you’re affiliated with an academic institution or not.
See the page My Independent Scholarship for information about my attempts to be/become a scholar.
Some of this is oriented towards acquiring research skills necessary to do research on your own. Like learning what you’d get from a PhD program, but on your own.
As in my discussion from July 2021:
From talking with professors and people who went to grad school (mostly PhDs, I think), my impression has been that in grad school / while pursuing their PhDs, beyond acquiring more knowledge about their field, they learned/developed an interesting sense of thinking about problems and a mindset or orientation towards addressing them that I haven’t quite found among people that haven’t gone through the grad school / PhD process.
For those of you that have had that experience or perceived it in others, please let me know and give me a description of it.
I’ve heard things about grad school that suggest to me that I might not want to go through the experience (highly political and stressful), but I’m quite interested in developing/acquiring for myself what I have perceived in others who have gone through it.
Relevant Books
- Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation, which relates to knowing what a PhD and dissertation is and entails
- See this podcast episode about it: How to Finish Your Dissertation https://player.fm/1BNVTGs
- Independent Scholar’s Handbook
Organizations
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_of_Independent_Scholars
https://ronininstitute.org/faq/
Various, (currently) unstructured notes
Be an independent scholar
- https://fee.org/articles/want-to-be-a-scholar-be-a-scholar-you-dont-need-academias-approval/amp
- https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/edward-p-butler/blog-independent-scholarship-process-venues-and-social-media
- https://helenkara.com/2016/06/30/ten-top-tips-for-becoming-an-indie-researcher/amp/
- Interesting: https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2991-6.html
- https://fromphdtolife.com/resources/recommended-reading/
- https://www.quora.com/How-does-one-get-started-as-an-independent-researcher
- https://thehistorywoman.com/2020/02/27/writing-books-as-an-independent-scholar/
- https://thesiswhisperer.com/2016/01/27/7183/amp/ very good
- Discussions
- https://www.academiceditingcanada.ca/blog/item/118-indy-scholar-why
- https://www.academictransfer.com/en/blog/how-to-transition-from-PhD-student-to-independent-scholar/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/whativebeenlearning/comments/nt234p/project_management_for_scholars/
Meta concerns articulated in the EconTalk podcast where the guy talked about peer review being just one of many potential ways of conducting research and participating in the scholarly community.
- Get the link to this podcast episode
Making research-oriented decisions about whether to do something: episode 153 of Effort Report podcast, 33:55 - https://player.fm/1BMhBmU?t=2035
It seems to be much less frequent that a person with only a Bachelor’s degree or less chooses and persists with the independent researcher life. It seems to be possible but difficult, especially in infrastructure-heavy fields like physics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar
As a possibly conservative estimate, for every 1 professor in academia, there might be 1 person that’s outside of academia who is interested in doing academic/scholarly things. Assuming only that much, you have a basic sense of the size of the market for such materials. (This relates well to PeerJoy estimates of people with interests in area.)