I was a student, and later faculty member, in an electrical engineering department, where the widely held opinion was that the way you wrote a thesis was to read many papers. Look at the last section, where there were always some “open problems.” Pick one, and work on it, until you are able to make a little progress. Then write a paper of your own about your progress, and don’t forget to include an “open problems” section, where you put in everything you were unable to do.

Unfortunately this approach, still widely practiced today, encourages mediocrity. It gives the illusion that research is about making small increments to someone else’s work. But worse, it almost guarantees that after a while, the work is driven by what can be solved, rather than what needs to be solved. People write papers, and the papers get accepted because they are reviewed by the people who wrote the papers being improved incrementally, but the influence beyond the world of paper-writing is minimal.