Necessity of ownership

Your journey is your journey. Not your tour guide’s journey, your friends’ journey, or the journey of the person who wrote the travel guide. You will likely fare better if you take full ownership of your trip, arriving at the key decisions and walking the talk. In the end, you want to look back on your voyage and get a distinct sense of this being something that you achieved, and not that you were merely a passenger along for the ride.

Consequently, we encourage you to take ownership of your project in the most complete sense of the term possible. Sure—in some instances, your project might be part of a larger research project which then defines part of what you do, but still: there ought to be left enough space for you to define, design, and fill with life. Your final academic project is part of your academic programme, and as such holds the potential to provide a great learning opportunity in independently engaging a problem. If your final academic project seems to be set up too differently from this general idea, try to win back some autonomy.

Research, to a degree, also means independence. This independence shows itself in the (at least relative) freedom to pick your topic, in your approach to help shed light onto what is not yet known, and in all the little design choices that shape your work ahead. The ‘relative’ nature of your freedom to pick and design your project points to the necessity of integrating within your context—your field’s state of the art and also, possibly, your supervisor’s project landscape if you are working on a project that he or she suggested to you. Still: try to capture a large bit of autonomy within your project so that you can rightfully claim that this was truly your final academic project.

(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”.)