The most important and most difficult part of a PhD, the dissertation has driven many graduate students to despair. Even before you start work, you have one big question that you must answer: how to choose a phd topic?  Choosing the right phd topic for your interests and abilities is critical to successfully completing the phd on time.

One thing to avoid is choosing a topic that is too difficult. The dissertation isn’t meant to be the cumulation of your life’s work; indeed, everything you do afterwards should be better because you have more experience. The dissertation is only supposed to show that you have sufficient ability to do independent research that makes a significant contribution to the literature; nobody expects you to write a seminal paper! Many students do some work in the area and even publish before choosing their phd topic; as a result, they have a better idea of how difficult their choice will be.

Part of writing your phd research proposal is defining the topic exactly so that it’s very clear how much work you need to do and when you’ll be finished.  You need to pick something that people will be interested in reading about; aside from meeting the significance requirement, this also will help you in the future as more people will have read your work and will be (hopefully) interested in collaborating with you or offering you a faculty job or research position! Defining the topic accurately also has the advantage of making it clear what you need to be working on so that you do not get sidetracked into related areas that, while interesting, may not get you closer towards completing the dissertation.

Of course, you’ll also want to choose a topic that you find interesting; if not, you may never finish the dissertation! Even with all that’s know, there is still tons of work to be done in almost every area; you should be able to find a significant problem that appeals to you.