I am still waiting for my acceptance in the graduate course of the Universidade de Campinas to work in the Geophysics Computational Group. However, I cannot stop myself to make plans about the ideas of projects I wish I can work on sometime.
$ \int_0^1 f(x) \, \mathrm{d} x $
Most of the time I ask myself, how could I be a good researcher? Having novel ideas about specific topics and at the same time being able to finish these ideas in manageable time.
The process of having ideas is not hard if you are an imaginative person, however I few struggled with this question: How can I know if my idea was not already explored in the past? (which is the most likely to happen - "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, there is nothing new under the sun" - Ecclesiastes.1.9)
For my luck, the geophysics community is very well organised and everything orbits around few international journals - Society of Exploration Geophysics and Wiley Online Library are the main resources of material for the community. I have been reading papers from 1950 or even before which surprisingly contains very up-dated material when compared with the kind of information we learn in the undergraduate courses (pardon for the generalization, however I feel it might be true worldwide averagely speaking).
