IKANGAI Solutions. e.u.

As I already discussed in a recent blog entry, working with students is interesting and always full of surprises. Sometimes, I am caught in negotiations with students about the work they should do. Recently, I asked a student to write a short (eight to ten pages) report on his project to prove that he has done programming work. Basically, I was asking for a report about activities that you (should) do in a software project: requirements analysis, the motivation for the project and some technical details about the work. Nothing outrageous, I believe. However, the student started a negotiation and asked if the subversion commit log is enough proof for his work. Truth be told, first I was baffled and then amused. Apparently, when I supervise students I am the one who should do the work and the students tell me what to do:

“What can I do for you that you get the credit points for your project? Wait, let me write the report. Now, even better: let me do the actual work. Just tell me what to do and will do it. Just send me your log files and I will do the rest. Thank you Sir!”

your ikangai science team

[UPDATE]
I was contacted by the student and we had a brief EMail conversation and clarified some mutual misunderstandings. It seems, that I misinterpreted his EMail: it was not his intention that I should do his work by analyzing the log files. He meant to provide the log files in addition to his project description. This is of course perfectly ok.

With the end of contract with university in one month, I spend some time reflecting on the experiences with students that I supervised. Generally speaking, working with students can be challenging. If is difficult not to forget that students are still learning how to do things while at the same time they should be able to produce results.

Personally, I found it very interesting that after students attended lectures on scientific working they all struggled with the actual scientific process. Apparently, when writing their Bachelor Thesis, nine out of ten students did not really know what a reference is. They did not know where to look for related work and showed little interest in doing so. The overall quality of the work also differed: some provided me with texts that where written like essays on some personal experience that find with 5th graders: “By coincidence I found the Web page of my advisor Martin Treiber…”. Others contained hilarious Germanisms like “The system consists of public and private parts”.

Others (the minority) produced work that was good, but still not excellent. However, some of the good students could have produced excellent work. They did not, because apparently there is no incentive to produce excellent work. I can only speculate, but I believe that a part of the reason for this is the overall culture at university. At university, we seem not to be able to motivate good students to do more that needed in order to produce something excellent. I think that lectures need greater flexibility when working with excellent students. For example, to be able to give excellent works extra credit points. Or put the work on the Web page of the university with some praise for the work.

Maybe competitions for the best student work can help to motivate students. To be fair, my university did already implement a part of this rewarding scheme for the best Master Thesis. However, it appears that students see this as additional burden for finishing their studies. It is not considered as opportunity to present their work and show it to a broader public. This is a bit surprising, because students sometimes complain that their work disappears in some drawer for good.

So, what is my recommendation for students? It is simple, but hard to do. I highly recommend to think of university studies as once in a lifetime opportunity to learn. Enjoy every single day and learn new things. Never forget: at university you have time to experiment and learn new technology. Later, you don’t.

your ikangai university team