Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

What are you personally interested in? What do you want to do after you graduate? Where specifically do you hope to work?

Since you'll be spending a lot of time working on your dissertation, find something that truly excites you. Ideally, it'd also be something that your ideal future employer would take notice of. The more unusual/specialized your research, the more interesting you'll be for future interviews as well.

Dear lil_MIZZ_justified,

You seem to be all over the map: an inch deep and a mile wide.

Stop. Breath. Relax. Focus.

From my outside perspective it seems you may be better off writing about advertising and business ethics. From what you've said it seems to be the strongest thematic element you've got, so why not go with that?

At some point you'll have to make a decision—that's the hardest thing. But once you've done that, you must take action.

From the standpoint of advertising and business ethics, one area that's potentially ripe with low hanging fruit, and one that ties in with the jewelry business is the diamond trade (lots of advertising and all kinds of environmental, economic, and social ethics—some of which may be great fodder for debate.

Diamonds induce greed, lust, envy, need, want, and desire. They're a bitch to get out of the ground and when you DO get them out of the dirt they look like crap. Yet they sell for stunning amounts of money, the advertising behind them drives all kinds of social rules about the way things "should" be, they're bought to symbolize eternal love yet people have died for them and people have killed and been killed for them.

And now, after billions of years underground, several scientists are growing gem quality diamonds in laboratories, stones that go WAY beyond cubic zirconium and that are so pure, some of the world's top gem experts are hard pressed to tell "real" stones pulled form the Earth from their scientifically created cousins. The former sell for thousands of dollars per carat, the latter sell for just a a few dollars for the same weight.

Here are two resources that might be of interest:

https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

www.gemesis.com

Here I'm not TELLING you to write about the diamond business; you may write about whatever you want to. All I'm doing is offering the diamond business as an example that ties in with your interest of advertising and ethics.

You could chose the fur trade; fair trade coffee and tea; the salad business; the gun trade, the tobacco trade; the illegal trade in ivory and exotic animals; the auto industry—all of which involve advertising and ethics. Or you could look at companies that give back to less well off people. Or you could look at specific brands and ask how they advertise and what their business ethics are. Virgin, Rolls Royce, Martha Stewart, and Donald Trump are four names that spring to mind but there are literally thousands of others.

There are lots of topics, the trick is in picking one and getting on with things. Ask who, what, why, where, when, and how questions and you'll have a pretty much limitless source of leads and potential avenues to explore.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA