Importance of Reading in Research

This is one of my favorite topics to speak about also in my personal life. I was raised by parents who were reading on daily basis. One thing they couldn't get me to do as a hobby was reading. Yes, I hated reading when I was a child. When I look back now, I am guessing it could be hidden dyslexia I have (not proved). Both of my parents were really worried and hardly believed that I wouldn't be successful at school. After completing 5th grade in Turkey and moving to Abu Dhabi (because of my dads work), and staring at The Cambridge High School I had better answers for myself. I didn't speak much English when I first started grade 6 and I could barely communicate with anyone or catch up with classes. One day one of our teachers were absent and the history teacher covered up for the math class. He was asking random math questions and even with my limited English, I was the only one who answered all of the questions. That day I realized that numbers were international and you could communicate with anyone using numbers. After that day I was so sure it wasn't the letters that was going to save my life. I only read when I really had to and if there was a very interesting reading book my best friends would recommend a couple of times.

Due to my interest in math and science I never had too much reading. It was manageable until I started my masters and decided to go for the thesis option. First thing my advisor wanted was start looking for papers that had the key words of my interest. The second step was to find lack of information in such topic. This exactly meant read anything you find and process the information and decide if it would be useful for my research. I spent 12-15 months of my masters period just reading and trying to sort out the right information. For me that was the most painful part of research until I came to a point where I sat down and wrote my 150 pages of thesis in less than a month with very minor corrections.

Now I am 25 with masters degree and guess what, if it is not interesting (research related or a reading book) I would just read 10 pages and never touch that book again. Using fast reading techniques and skipping unrelated part of papers (to my research), I am trying to keep the habit of reading as much as possible. Another very important point is, to be a good research writer, knowledge on such topic is very important and only way to get there is to know every tiny bit of research and to site the right information at the right point.