Opinion
of salad and searches A Primer
by Cresten Mansfeldt Cornell University
We all are searching for something. Most mornings, it is my keys. I have a tendency to randomly place them in hidden locations around my apartment. Once, I discovered them in the fridge, in the vegetable drawer, inside a head of lettuce. Every time I move, though, the time to discover my keys increases for a bit and then decays back to a baseline level. I learn from each of my searches and discover patterns in both the way I hide my keys from myself and how I go about looking for them. As a graduate student, I am obsessed with searching. I spend the majority of my day conducting experiments or pouring through volumes of data looking for answers to scientific riddles. With around 1.8 million other likeminded graduate students scattered across America, what can we learn about who we are from how we search?
30
The internet is both a godsend and time sink for graduate students. Through that network, we can exchange valuable datasets as well as a seemingly infinite number of cats (in almost any form). However, a lot of the activity siphons through the search giant Google. Wisely, they started to track and share the searching behavior of users through a suite of tools. Google TrendsTM is a particularly great way to lose an afternoon by plugging in different search terms, especially for those who get excited by data logging and statistical analysis (like me). However, for those who are like me, you must forgive, I will not be presenting rigorous statistical analysis. This is more a holistic romp through searches specific to graduate school on the internet.
Getting In You finish your undergraduate degree, however you still wish to hide out in academia. You are probably a slightly savvy searcher. Where do you turn? The internet!
What if we look at the term “graduate school” as the general search term and a plausible key phrase in all our early searches about higher academics? The trend of the search volume displays a natural rise and fall with the peak occurring around mid-January and the trough occurring in mid-summer. This potentially reflects the increased interest in graduate school applications in the winter and the gradual notice of acceptance throughout the Spring. Additionally, the month of December is an outlier, as a sharp drop-off occurs halfway through that month and recovers after the first of the year. We’ve stumbled upon winter break! Surprisingly, this departure from the standard wave form of the curve is also seen in the trend of “research” in a more dramatic fashion. Apparently, over the holiday break, less people are willing to think about graduate schools and their research.