TITLE: How to begin doing research
QUESTION [6 upvotes]: I wanna start doing my own research... I've grown somewhat restless about the regular undergraduate training - study something, solve the problems, rinse and repeat. I feel like I've had enough training up until now to start doing some thinking on my own. Do you have any suggestions as how to start? For example, is there anywhere I can find what topics would be good topics to research? Or could I just start playing around with where I feel I might find something and take it from there.
Hope you can help.

REPLY [8 votes]: I would approach one of your professors and ask them about it. Try a professor who you know and whose class you enjoyed. They might be able to suggest some problems, or you might even discover that there are undergraduate research programs at your school. Choosing appropriate research problems is a fine art and your professors should be able to help you with it. It is altogether too easy to choose problems which are too easy (maybe with known or trivial solutions), or too hard (like the Riemann hypothesis). It can be difficult to find a problem which is substantial enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't make any progress at all. There is really no substitute for having an expert, like one of your professors, to guide you in choosing and solving a problem.