Scarce resources
Supervisors are keenly aware that supervision work draws from too little resources.
The top priorities of most academic institutions focus on publications, certifications, rankings, third-party funding, and the organisation of educational offers. These are the objectives that generate the most career-oriented return of investment for each researcher. I’ve never heard anyone report that their university counted research mentoring among these top priorities. Consequentially, investing resources into research mentoring simply does not pay off. Even for those who are convinced that research mentoring is critical to the mission of a university, resources will be strictly limited. How do you still generate an impressive research experience for your students?
Helping a final academic project to turn into a memorable experience for a student takes time and effort. In a setting where these resources are largely not available for the job at hand, we need to place at least one – if not two – levers to generate more space for this mission.
The first lever we can use is to increase our efficiency as mentors. This can be achieved just like many other instances of increasing efficiency through digitalization. The idea is to scale those parts of the job that do not particularly benefit from manufacturing manually each time, and to free up space and time for those parts of the job that do benefit from individual handling. The former might be instances of repetitive instruction and general guidance on methodology, procedure, and technicalities. Everything that serves as a useful thought to many students can be scaled. The latter might be critical instances in which students need conscious and customized support in specific situations – instances that cannot be scaled. By this differentiation alone, we will likely be able to free up and shift an estimate of 50% of resources to those critical student research instances that truly require our attention.
The second lever deals with the perceived priority of student research at our institutions. At universities that consider their student research as a necessary process part that requires supervising, little value and much cost is associated with student research. At universities that discovered how much value resides in student research, this equation shifts to provide the value side a greater weight. This does not automatically mean that universities suddenly put mentoring student research on top of their priorities list, but the topic might advance from the large pool of “other topics” university leadership needs to keep running. All of a sudden, university leadership might discover the strategic value of enabling and highlighting their graduates’ successes – and not in an award for one person, but in the breadth of great contributions achieved. Here, university leadership is the key actor to influence and wake to the potential of a regularly unused resource.
Instead of attempting to fit high-quality mentoring into a minuscule resource budget, let’s rather attack the issue on both sides: Let’s become more efficient by setting up scaling mentoring systems for our students on one hand and try to rally our university to take student research more seriously by highlighting our students’ research contributions for our universities.
This episode of the Thesis Thursday concludes the series of posts on the matter of challenges for students and academics with student research. Student research is a critical outcome of every student’s academic journey. Often, it is their final touchpoint with academia. This is why their experience with research matters so much: their experience during their final thesis will determine their evaluation of research and the likeliness of their application of research methodology in their professional life. Students who leave university without a conviction that academic conduct and research methodology matters cannot be counted as successes for our academic community. Each and every talent matters here. For future generations to stand on the shoulders of giants, we need more new, young giants to emerge. This is our challenge.