[qrcodetag size="150" link="false"]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

Tags: students, Teaching, Vienna Technical University