Repeating for everyone

Supervisors find it tiresome to repeat
their instructions for each student.

Academic mentoring is thoroughly individualized coaching of individual students, one at a time. However, the subject of the coaching – good conduct during a research project – is largely equivalent across students. Thus, even though the relationships and needs for support are individual, the suggestions and recommendations shared are largely comparable. In short: academic mentoring means repeating insights over and over and over again. 

In the context of The Student’s Research Companion, we have explored opportunities in the initial steps of a digital thesis companion and supervision scaling project: Research Stride. A central tenet of Research Stride is to make academic mentoring content easy to capture and to curate as a foundation for new students who engage their research journey. Fully reversing the challenge of repeating instructions one by one, this idea carries further to also make own mentoring content available for other supervisors who use the platform. Why not make mentoring content available to more than just one’s own group of supervisees? While it takes a town to raise a child, why would it not be beneficial to enable the better part of a university full of academics to mentor each of their future graduates by making the collective set of mentoring insight available?

Instead of repeating ourselves over and over when coaching one student after the other on basics, we should rather capture and make available these often repeated instructions and invest efforts into the non-standard instances more deserving of our attention.

First, central mentoring insights, recommendations, and guidelines should be captured by supervisors to rather allow them to point students to self-service solutions for basic questions rather than incapacitating themselves by repeating themselves over and over. Second, particularly specialized insights in methodologies and fields would be useful to be broadly shared by academic mentors – not just among their students, but university-wide or even without limitation. Finally, capturing and sharing mentoring insight is bound to alleviate at least some (and hopefully increasing amounts of) resources. These resources can flow back into mentoring and coaching those cases that rightfully take greater amounts of attention – not because of inherent inefficiencies, but rather because of careful consideration and the freedom to invest available resources.

Do you capture and share your research mentoring insights systematically? What are your experiences? What can be won from trying to dismantle the repetition challenge? What cannot be won here?