2012-09-27, 02:20 AM
Sardines Wrote:Yes well. Say you wanted to study electrons traveling in a vacuum to see if they really do travel at the speed of light. You'd need apparatus that isn't normally available in anywhere but a physics or chemistry department. Now let's say you wanted to study the brown spotted mouse, however no one cares about it. How are you going to get funding or continue the project. How are you going to justify to the school that your time is better spent on studying animals than doing follow up reports on a clinical for a new human drug that is being experimented on mice. You want to do research. But do you know if you want to do academia research?How are you going to get funding for projects outside the system?
More importantly, being official about it means that:
1) you're adding to the ~approved~ pool of knowledge (and depending on your field, how/whether you additionally disseminate your findings to the masses may be up to you), whereas even if you managed solo, resourcewise, nothing you say counts as far as the establishment is concerned, and your findings go no further than yourself and other similarly powerless people;
2) you're in touch with and have access -- provisional though it may be -- to a community of fellow-researchers who may be mentors, collaborators, and dialogue-participants;
2a) this includes previous generations of researchers whose writings are, 90% of the time, hidden behind paywalls that universities can access.
Also you get paid. Even if it's a piddling amount when you're starting out.