We are fortunate to have become aware of Kim's work and won her support for this book project through her co-authorship in the insightful and thought-provoking article “Drowning in the shallows: an Australian study of the PhD experience of wellbeing”. Today, Kim works as a Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology. Before, she acted as a Lecturer Curriculum and Pedagogy on Equity and Diversity at the University of Tasmania, where she was also awarded her PhD and worked as a Sustainability (Project) Officer and Unit Coordinator.

While discussing the student final academic project experience and useful mindsets for it, Kim reminded us of a perspective of critical importance: any student’s experience of their project hinges to a large degree on the performance and appropriateness of the academic and administrative system they are subjected to. Any useful mindset shared can and should not hide the fact that the greatest potential for improvement is in revising and optimizing this final academic project system. While useful mindsets can help individual students cope with being subjected to a system in need of optimization, it cannot and should not help systematically off-load the duty to cope with a non-optimal system at the students’ feet. Particularly striking and memorable ideas include transferring insight from social care research into the academic domain by rethinking and systematically increasing the number of social and academic supports during the final project. Other thoughts circled the observations of and solutions to time-poverty among students and supervisors alike.