How to do it
Students are often unsure of how
to tackle their research project.
Conducting a project brings plenty of questions and challenges all by itself. However, what if that project also serves as a critical examination administered to you by highly decorated, intelligent, and experienced people? An examination that might not only lead to a more or less important evaluation, but, much more critically, the all-encompassing decision on whether the investment of the past years has finally led to success or rather been in vain. It does not surprise that students feel the chills and possibly a greater-than-normal anxiety about taking the wrong turn to climb their personal, academic Everest.
In The Student’s Research Companion, we discuss many challenges of positioning a project like, e.g., bringing capabilities and the wish to build new ones and the suggestion to link a topical positioning to an audience and their problems. But there are even less obvious decisions that can stop a student in their tracks if misunderstood. One of these decisions deals with whether a research design is a choice or a determination. Another decision deals with the source of meaning that emerges from the project. But there are also much more mundane challenges to overcome: unwritten rules, standards and requirements that go without saying at one institute but might be different at another. These sometimes cultural, sometimes administrative, and sometimes even political details seem like they can only be uncovered by bumping into them, blindfolded. Any combination of these aspects can turn any proficient and driven researcher to a more cautious, if not discouraged student, less capable than what they would have been in different circumstances. The issue remains: the project will only be conducted, and the thesis will only be written, if the discouraged student turns themselves back into a driven and proficient researcher to dig in and plough through. But how?
To avoid getting stuck at the start, why not review your goal, a generic path to that goal, and which decisions on the path to your goal are really yours to make, to determine, or predetermined for you to follow.
An old saying asks for the power to change what needs changing, the endurance for what needs enduring, and the wisdom to tell one from the other. This is not unrelated. First, ask yourself what you want to achieve – find an answer to a question, make a contribution to an audience, just write the text and graduate: your goal must make sense to you. Second, depending on your goal, a generic path to success will become gradually more obvious. Third, reflect on that path in the context of which decisions you can make freely and implement in accordance with your goals (often fewer than expected), which decisions best seem to be determined from other information (more common), and which decisions are explicitly restricted to the preferences of your research context. Merely by focusing on your goal, a generic path, and a reduction of complexity by categorizing what you may design freely, deterministically, or what others have determined for you, you will regain clarity that will make it easier to progress.
How do you help students who get stuck at the outset of their project? Did you experience this yourself? How did you manoeuvre yourself out of being beached?