146 12 Beyond the Thesis
your confidence, not just in public speaking but in general interaction with other
students and academics. If it makes sense to take on teaching assignments during
your research then my suggestion is that you do so.
Another academic activity is mentoring. It may not at first be obvious that learn-
ing to mentor is an important part of being a research student, but I think it is a
core skill. Why? One reason is that a large part of succeeding as a research student
is your interaction with your supervisor—whose guidance is a form of mentoring.
A wonderful piece of advice I was given early in my PhD was to learn to ask the
questions my supervisor would ask, to anticipate what my supervisor would want,
and to solve issues that my supervisor would be concerned about. In other words, I
was being advised to try and put myself in my supervisor’s role, and regard him as
leading by example. From this perspective, research study is a form of apprentice-
ship, where skills are passed by practice and example from master to novice. By
becoming an academic, you must also become a mentor.
Opportunities for mentoring vary from discipline to discipline, and might in-
clude coaching of undergraduates, involvement in small research projects, or part-
nering with junior research students. Such mentoring can have many benefits, not
least of which is that they can lead to lifelong working relationships.
As a supervisor I notice that my students who are themselves mentors are better
than other students at understanding what I require of them. That is, their experience
of mentoring may be helping them to understand the student–supervisor relation-
ship from both perspectives, and to build a more effective partnership with me.
Such students are good at knowing when to seek advice—and will happily seek
it when appropriate to do so—and are also good at knowing when guidance should
not be sought, that is, they should try to answer their questions for themselves. It is
not clever to batter away at a problem if a few minutes of someone’s time is all that
is needed to point you in the right direction, but nor is it clever to ask for guidance
on every little momentary issue that troubles you. A mature student sets problems
aside for later consideration, resolving some and sharpening others for future con-
versations with a mentor, rather than seeing every unknown as an obstacle for which
guidance is required.
Effective Research........................................................................................
What are the skills of an effective researcher, and how are they acquired? The an-
swer to this question lies in the background of the students who enter research
degrees, which, quite simply, is highly variable. People who decide to undertake
research may have come straight from another degree (which might have been their
first degree after secondary school), or may have been in the workforce for decades
in one capacity or another. Thus a new student might be expert in recent academic
knowledge, but inexperienced in terms of independence and skills such as writing;
or may be skilled in the practice of their discipline, but out of touch with the latest
developments. The research may be interdisciplinary in some way (for example,