teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

“No one has done X” is not a gap. It is frequently evidence that X is not worth doing, and a committee will say so. A gap is a specific thing that is now possible and previously was not — because data became available, because a solver got faster, because a policy changed. Students who cannot tell those apart write proposals that get rejected for a reason nobody articulates clearly enough to fix.

External material

None worth assigning. The database tutorials teach searching; nothing published teaches the mechanic below well enough to substitute for it.

Governing part

None.

The mechanic

1. Fifteen papers. Fewer and the empty regions are artefacts of your sample.

2. Generate three candidate axes, then choose one. Spatial resolution. System boundary. Time horizon. Whether storage is co-optimised. Write all three down before you commit to one, and write a sentence on why you rejected each of the other two.

   The discarded two are not waste. Choosing between framings is the creative half of critical thinking, and a student who only ever saw one framing did not choose it — they defaulted to it. A committee will ask why you cut the field this way, and “it was the obvious axis” is not an answer.

3. Plot them on it. Literally. A scatter, a strip, a timeline — something with position.
4. Find the empty region, then say why it is empty. This is the step that does the work. Sometimes the answer is “nobody had the data until ERCOT published it in 2024.” Sometimes it is “because it is not tractable and three people have tried.” Only the first is a gap.
5. Write the sentence: X is established, Y has not been tried, therefore Z.

Deliverable

PDF containing the map, the fifteen citations, and the gap paragraph.

Competency check

• Fifteen papers, cited
• Three candidate axes written down before one was chosen, each rejected one with a stated reason
• One named axis, with units or categories stated
• Every paper positioned on it
• The empty region identified
• One sentence on why it is empty, distinguishing “not yet possible” from “not worth doing”
• The three-part sentence, written out

Turning it in

This replaces your reading entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WR assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: the axis you chose, and what you would have seen through the two you rejected.
• You hand in: A PDF: your three candidate axes with a reason for rejecting two, fifteen cited papers positioned on the one you chose, the empty region, and the three-part gap sentence

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M3 are done, submit the M3 — Reading and Reasoning assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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