Fortify your academic skills

While research may look like an intellectual travel agency from the outside, with all those people planning and undertaking mental and methodological trips to places they find interesting, it may be more difficult to appreciate that it’s not mere tourism. Research trains a sense of how to prepare for a journey, how to keep motivating yourself to put one foot in front of the other, and how to scale sheer cliffs of methodology and not fall off. All of these individual capabilities come together in a way of thinking, experiencing, and steering journeys. Therein lies the subtle fabric of what is to be learned when doing research.

Consequently, try to get a sense of what lies beneath all the careful phrasing of research questions, prior research, methodology, analysis, writing, and so on. What does it mean to you? Since you may continue by leaving the academic context, the chances are high that you will be confronted by many ways of approaching challenges that are rather foreign to this sense of insightfully, objectively, and carefully exploring questions to generate answers. In a way, you have been trained as a professional, appreciative, and responsible mountain guide, but you are now entering the job market in the tourism industry. The sense instilled by your training is likely to come under pressure.

Research cultivates a way of thinking and self-leadership that is distinct from the impressions other activities leave you with. It is a highly critical, highly differentiating, sensitive, and precise way of appreciating the complexities and implications of subjects and methodologies. To a degree, your mind has turned into a finely tuned and highly specialized mechanism that can produce reliable and valid insight. That is the value of an academic education. Keeping this machine tuned and as sharp as possible will determine how much and for how long you will generate benefit from your education.

(This is a preview section. The full chapter on this topic continues with the sections “Rough coordinates”, “Train of thought”, “In essence”, “To reflect”, “Two travellers’ tales”, “Devil’s advocate”, and “How to tackle”.)