Countless projects
Supervisors find it difficult to cope with the
growing number of projects that need supervising.
Where one supervisor guided a handful of students in the past, she now helps along a dozen. A few years down the road, university attendance will have grown in a way that the same supervisor will have to support a second dozen students and their projects. The chasm between university attendance and resources leads to an inevitable change in one-on-one mentoring.
In general, university scales very well. If you have more students, you build a larger lecture hall and give the lecturer a microphone. Especially since Covid19, the lecture hall has expanded into the digital realm as well, making lectures - and many examinations - more or less limitless in terms of possible attendance. One of the few remaining areas that do not scale, however, is the orchid-like experience of mentored student research. Working on an individually supervised academic project is the ultimate - resource-wise - luxury that a university can provide. Sadly, there are few of these luxuries left at universities and since the rest of the institution scales quite well, the mentoring experience of student research will come under even greater pressure in the future than it already is today. Here, a great student research experience is not only cornered by the interests of the growing institution, but also by the career interests of the academics: too few student research projects yield a result that can be usefully and fairly built upon in own, publishable research projects. For the student research experience to improve, we need to change gears and find ways to improve scalability.
Instead of shrinking the one-on-one mentoring to the bare minimum of resources, let’s rather seek opportunities to scale mentoring insight and turn student guidance into a matter of digital enablement rather than the traditional handful of meetings in an office.
We are currently working on a digital project - Research Stride - that aims at realizing just that: scaling the one-on-one mentoring experience by digitizing it. One of the guiding principles is that it takes a whole academic village to mentor and mature a young academic mind. This entails that - while evaluation will remain with one dedicated assessor - helpful thoughts and guidance does not need to remain limited to one source, but can come from many sources. The insight won by the researchers will be more versatile and more complete, while the necessary effort by individual supervisors will decline: a scaling system emerges.
How do you try to handle the growing number of project requests for supervision, while not declining in quality of your mentoring? Do you commonly have to decline applications for supervision?