"Research is easy! You have your hypothesis, your starting point, experimentation, perhaps some optimizations and options you take along the way followed by results, analysis and whalah, you are done and have forever changed the world..."
... SAID NO ONE EVER!
Here's an example from a mathematical modeling of infectious disease class I took several years back while still in grad school.
The plan:
Everything goes smoothly...splendidly even, and we all take tea breaks as our analyses run seamlessly without errors or missing/wrongly formatted data leading to a totally understandible, interpretable results that confirms all our hypotheses...
Reality:
By the end, I think we all just wanted a stiff drink.
And this is research!
The glory and terribleness of it - it's exciting, frustrating and above all a learning process.
