Tangled projects
Supervisors find it difficult to follow students’ obscure paths of progress.
How do you guide someone who needs to find - and in many cases create - their own path to a place not many people have been before? Especially if the journey depends on intermediary results, precisely predicting an itinerary will likely be futile. So how do you mentor a student whose research project rather appears to be emergent than to be implemented steadfastly according to a well-calculated plan?
Even though supervisors to final academic projects neither have the obligation nor the time to follow every in and out of their students’ projects, getting a general overview of where things are headed is well within the expectations of good supervising. At the very least, at the end of a supervision and during the evaluation of the work, supervisors need to be able to follow the process of their mentees to the degree that the mentors can evaluate their students’ decisions. But it’s not only that - good supervision also provides a safety-net for students not to get stuck and waste considerable amounts of time unproductively. If a student’s research process is so opaque and tangled that a research mentor either loses interest or simply cannot afford the effort to follow the project because it is a tangled and incomprehensible chaos, this safety-net is fading in strength. The most profound problem with all of this is that the interaction and, consequently, the potential of researcher-mentor-collaboration vanishes if the effort involved with leveraging this potential outweighs all possible returns. All in all, creating an enigma of a project neither benefits the researcher nor the mentor - nor the team of both. Required and thus induced transparency is a useful helper here: requiring transparency makes explaining tangled structures and processes uncomfortable and helps students avoid them.
Instead of tuning out on tangled students’ research projects, let’s rather establish ground rules on transparency and communication on the project to facilitate some degree of transparency. Presenting projects less than easily quickly raises red flags and allows steering the project away from needless complexity.
No project is bound to be tangled - they turn out as tangled if they are not being led consciously in a balance between ambition and simplicity. Keeping the project transparent is a great gauge for that. It is important to differentiate between a reasonably transparent project that follows the regular twists and turns and a project that gets less and less transparent with each twist and turn that remains unobservable. Thus, to avoid ending up with tangled student projects, it is useful to set up ground rules with new mentees regarding the planning of their project and reasoning of changes to that plan. These ground rules should suit you as a mentor because you will be the supervision bottleneck of many projects at the same time. Make it your priority to define a reasonable standard in which you want to be kept up to date with student research projects, and require students to stick to that standard.
How do you help students to keep their projects untangled? Do you have proven ideas for keeping students engaged in providing a transparent project?