For the past few weeks I have been working on learning and reading as much as possible. My initial thoughts were that it was important for me to figure out what sources of information the core developers use to stay up to date, and to co-ordinate their research efforts. The main (organised) one that I found is the R&D Discord. I therefore used the Discord guidebook repository as a loose framework for what I should be interested in - ensuring that what I am learning about are active initiatives.
I composed a large list of links covering each active topic in the Discord. Many of these links I sourced from the channels themselves. They are of varying quality and shouldn't be considered exhaustive, but it was a useful exercise for me. I find it extremely beneficial when learning something new to be able to follow the evolution of an idea over time - hence the focus on categorising the links by topic and approximate date posted.
Once I had completed this, I started reading and taking notes. While I took notes, I also tried to keep an eye out for potential projects. Some areas of the protocol were immediately more interesting to me than others - these naturally became the areas that I concentrated on for my inital project proposal generation. My notes at this stage are also meant to be more broad than deep - it was my goal to get a good grasp of what the open concerns for each research initiative are.
I ended up with potential projects in three areas - witnesses, account abstraction, and formal methods - details of these can be found here. It was hard to choose as I find all these research areas interested for different reasons, but I have decided on the second witness project - Validate that EIP-3584 is sufficient for witnesses - for the first project exploration. This was mainly because I feel that it touches more areas than the others and therefore might be smarter to do for this program. Honestly, I would be interested in working on all of them at some point.
I am currently working on the detailed project description for this project and expect to have it completed by the next development update.