The Security Project: Research and associated musings
 Wherein the author is critical of his undergraduate research project:
By way of a follow on to the earlier post on the topic: The (academic) security project rolls on, with about a month to complete our tasks, which essentially involves superficial evaluation of certain mobile phone data acquisition software which purport some valid ‘forensics’ functions, the actual efficacy of which I am at this point fairly dubious of.
The project has so far, had a late (false?) start: the team started out strong, meeting every week and discussing possible activities, making some preliminary documentation, taking care of administrative overhead such as our blog and google group mailing list, but with little input from the supervisor for the first month (and consequently no real research material or project direction to forge ahead with) we slowed down and lost momentum, not from lack of enthusiasm, but simply because there was nowhere to go.
Input was finally recieved and we have started working on a task which will eventually generate our assessible output, but I have the unfortunate feeling that the intervening weeks/months were spent in a state of drift: I really do dislike the sensation of wasted time.
I must confess, this type of thing instills doubts in me concerning the potential allure of completing a postgraduate degree in this field, and I am contemplating my options.
Granted: this is undergraduate research, albeit a dry run, research with training wheels on, and I have little doubt the main point of the exercise is far less one of generating any meaningful or useful output, and more the demonstration of hoop jumping by us, the so called ‘researchers’, in order to demonstrate our ability to jump said hoops to the required level of technical precision, documenting and referencing of each hoop along the way.
In other words, an undergraduate research project intended to be completed inside a semester, effective working time actually in the region of 4-5 weeks, isn’t inspiringly worthwhile in terms of either ‘research’ or ‘project’. This is less those things, and more along the lines of an assignment from any of a number of the other units I have completed over the past few years. A month is not an unreasonable amount of time to complete a simple assignment, even a group assignment with its associated organisational complications, but the whole shebang falls far short of expectations.
So back on the topic of postgraduate options, of which I am constantly exploring: Conditions are more or less optimal for me to continue my studies here in comfort (I work at the institution already), but I will need to seriously examine whether or not I feel the time and effort investment is worthwhile. I am certain if progress in this direction is continued I will gain my qualification up to the PhD level within a tolerable number of years, and a doctorate is something I’ve always liked the idea of, but on the flip side, that chunk of energy could be expended in another, different, possibly more rewarding direction.
Plenty to consider. In the meantime, I have six months left to complete this degree. On the project front, our team is poking away at the forensics report: with a couple of weeks solid effort I’m hoping we can wipe out most of the actual work so I can stop thinking about it and move on to items of more interest.
