About the "help me finding my thesis" request

Today I want to talk about a strange phenomenon I've seen recently: students asking online about ideas for their thesis.

Nothing strange, you'd say, exchanging ideas is a very good thing. What puzzles me is the content of the requests.

Working at a University, I'm used to assign and follow masters or Ph.D thesis. When a student comes to me to ask for a thesis topic, we discuss a lot about the research topics we carry in our lab, along with the student's interests and background. Then we settle down on a suitable topic and I give the student a number of source material to study.

During the thesis work, we have also periodic meetings to verify the student's progress and how the (obvious) issues can be solved.

I expect the student to play an active role in his/her work, by suggesting thing I didn't think of, find new ways to solve issues, and so on. In order to do that, I (of course) need to know the topic he/she is working on.

And here comes the thing that is puzzling me.

I keep finding people asking the user groups (or by private e-mails) about a research topic. It's like if their tutors didn't discuss about possible topics with them, just outlining an extremely broad topic.
E.g., "find a topic related to MANETs, or VANETs" (Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks, respectively).

Now, these topics are so broad-range that a tutor can not possibly follow all the research topics that could come up. An example for VANETs:

• Intra-vehicular channel model.
• Fast channel scanning/allocation.
• Efficient resource management.
• QoS support.
• Routing (Location-based, semantic, cluster based, etc.).
• Cluster forming.
• IP[v6] and Mobile IPv6.
• Traffic patterns.
• Resource discovery algorithms.
• Mobile cloud networking.
• Mobile cloud applications.
• Security (e.g., how to join a secure cluster).
• Privacy in VANETs.

And that's just to name a few coming to my mind. I voluntarily left out the more specific topics related to the actual technology used, i.e., 802.11p, 802.15.x, LTE, D2D, etc., plus all the choices about protocols to be used in all the different parts of the network.

What will happen if the student comes up with an idea and his/her tutor is not actively involved in that research topic. Because let's be serious, nobody can know everything. The tutor will not be able to judge the idea difficulty and originality. And will not be able to understand what are the hidden issues in the proposed idea (the student might not have any clue either).

Result: a thesis that's too hard, or too simple. If they're lucky.

If they are unlucky, the thesis will have an extremely bad background, and the results will be plainly useless. In this case, the student will learn nothing. Not what's the scientific research method, not what's the real work method. Nothing at all, the thesis will be just paperwork.

Of course there may be lucky cases, where the student will come up with an interesting idea and the tutor is actually able to follow him/her. But I'm not confident that this is a normal case.

Mind, I'm not blaming the students to ask this kind of questions online (i.e., help me finding my thesis topic). I'm questioning their tutors.

Probably it's a matter of knowledge. I simply don't know how this process could work. Maybe I'm missing something. I hope I'm missing something.

If anybody can enlighten me, I'll be very happy.