Seeking peers
Students struggle with finding peers and fostering beneficial exchange.
To many, the thesis project is a critical, stressful, and isolating experience: seemingly endless literature review, difficult choices when setting up your research project, and then weeks of writing are certainly a change from the previous experience. However, also seeking the company of peers can induce challenges: how do you not compare progress among each other? How do you, possibly already with a somewhat shaken self-confidence, not fall into the trap of feeling too far behind?
The thesis is intentionally isolating, since it aims to assess one person’s individual proficiency to conduct a research project. For many students, this isolation comes at a cost of diminished mental well-being. The commonly decreased offers for exchange during the thesis among students leads to a decrease in social cohesion. The examination setting, on the other side, increases competitive pressure. Competition, in turn, fuels comparison behaviour among often difficult to compare projects and thus an increase in uncertainty and stress. Stress that piles on top of the original tension of the academic examination and – even more fundamental – the demanding project itself. It does not surprise that the thesis project holds its own, demanding set of individual and social challenges, which can considerably decrease the perceived and actual mental well-being of the students involved. This decrease in well-being not only results in lower comfort for junior researchers, but actual impact on their performance and overall quality of life: who has not yet seen those students in the final weeks of their projects, pale and worn from the experience, rather resembling ghosts than young talent. Isolation is not only an often tolerated academic design choice, it is also the source of a considerable decrease in junior research experience and performance.
Instead of emphasizing the thesis as an individual examination of performance and taking the isolation effect as collateral damage, let’s rather encourage our students to build a diverse network of contacts and social supports which might reach far beyond their academic context.
While working on “The Student’s Research Companion”, it was in particular Kim Beasy who reminded me how important a tightly-knit, robust, and diverse network of social support is for students not to lose their nerves during the thesis. These social supports might be fellow students working on their project – but it does not have to be. To avoid comparison behaviour and obsessing on progress, you might build on a network of contacts with more experience – graduates – or less experience. To put your academic project into perspective, you might choose to seek contact outside your academic bubble. Maybe you intensify exchange with friends in sports or other social clubs, make sure you continue to pursue your hobbies and reach out to new contacts here? All of that in the service of finding context to your work, putting that all-encompassing project into perspective, and safeguarding sources of relaxation, motivation, and energy.
What is your experience in terms of the isolating nature of student research? What do you recommend, and how do you best avoid being drawn into the comparison game as a student?