Academic Frontier] How I use Cursor to write Dissertation at a QS Top 120 University

Hi everyone,

I’m a PhD candidate in Higher Education While most of you use Cursor to build apps, I’m using it to “deconstruct” the history of education systems.

Why Cursor for a Social Science PhD? In my field, we deal with thousands of pages of fragmented policy documents. Traditionally, this is a manual nightmare. By treating my research library as a “Knowledge Codebase” in Cursor:·

@Codebase Search: I can instantly find how a specific educational concept (like “Typological Education”) evolved from 1980 to 2024 across 500+ documents.

Composer for Synthesis: I use the Composer to help draft complex literature reviews, ensuring the logic remains consistent with the indexed data.

I believe we are seeing the birth of “AI-Driven Social Science.” I’m currently documenting this methodology in my final dissertation.

To the Cursor Team: I’d love to see more “Academic Mode” features, such as better support for PDF citations or cross-reference mapping for non-code files.

I’m curious—are there any other researchers here using Cursor for “Non-Coding” intellectual work? Let’s connect!

Very good, needs discussion.