The Third Degree

Dear New PhD Student Dear New PhD Student   This is an exciting time for you as you embark on your journey towards a doctoral degree. As your supervisor, I thought I should write to welcome you and give you a few handy hints that may help both of us to survive this long journey. We both have much to learn. Although we have exchanged emails, we do not know each other well. I feel at the outset, we have to display the good in us, and hide the crazy. Over the next three years this balance will switch, as we each reveal our true selves.   My role is to guide you through the minefield that is the modern research process. You will learn how to identify gaps in knowledge, critically review literature, pose useful research questions, devise testable hypotheses, acquire the necessary ethical approvals, collect and analyse data and so on.   But remember I am not your sister, nor your mother, nor am I your counsellor – I am not your friend either. Some supervisors regularly socialis...

In Loco Parentis?  Did I Foretell A Trend?   I belong to some pretty ‘fun’ social media groups for academics and lecturers. They discuss real issues; course design, delivery styles, student interaction, and student “issues”. My crazy insomnia keeps me up most nights, and these groups being a tad more ‘North American centric” give me plenty of entertaining fodder to keep me company in my sleepless mode.   As I reflect on their discussions (and they are good discussions) and my own lecturing experience (both online and off) over the past close to three decades, it draws me towards a single conclusion about the enhanced “neediness” of students, and not just because of the pandemic.   Friends and colleagues who teach way more than me also have commented on that particular trajectory. They regularly highlight issues and behaviours that, even ten years prior, would not have emerged in the classroom, and most certainly, not in the lecture hall.   But that...