Supervisors, tutors, and getting along with people.

I've been trying to find the right platform to talk about a thing that I've found really important and those who've seen my tweets (and heard me talk about pretty much anything uni related) know what it is. Before coming to university I never thought about supervisors but after getting the chance to work alongside two great ones... good supervisors make a difference.

Although I was a student academic rep in my first year I still felt like there's a gap between students and lecturers, which is quite normal. After all, lecturers are in a position of authority. However, having respect and appreciation towards someone doesn't mean that communication has to be awkward, as I've discovered during the past year. When I was starting up with my research project I was excited but also kind of scared — how could I, a second year student, do anything that would be of any importance and why would anyone really care about it?

I was lucky to be paired with a lecturer who has been incredibly helpful — never in a million years would I have thought that I could work alongside people at a departmental level and feel like they appreciate my input. It has been so different from the "supervisor — student" -setting we had in the IB with our extended essays. My supervisor back then was bad, or well, both of them were, and I didn't really get any support whatsoever. While some part of it was certainly my own fault, I'm not able to think very highly of those people as supervisors. However, past is in the past and it was a good learning process, the whole IB experience was.

Different people will quite likely have their own opinions on what makes a good supervisor and it's not really a "one size fits all" -type of thing. However, I've personally found that a good supervisor is someone who makes you feel at ease when talking to them. They make you feel respected and somewhat at level with them, not inferior and an idiot who knows nothing. Someone being approachable and you having respect towards them are not mutually exclusive concepts — I really respect most of our lecturers and if they're easy to talk to, it's a definite bonus.

The same goes for personal tutors. Again, it's not a one-way street and having rapport requires effort from the student as well. It would be silly to expect to have a good professional relationship with someone whose name you barely remember and whom you've met once in the beginning of your studies. For the most part tutors do want to meet their tutees but students just don't make use of office hours due to various reasons, but one of the most common ones seems to be not knowing what to talk about.

We are supposed to meet with our personal tutors once per semester and got an email about this in the beginning of semester 1. I went to meet my tutor sometime in October and turned out that I was the first tutee to see them because "we are supposed to". Even I spent two weeks thinking about things to talk about, wrote multiple lists in order to have a somewhat coherent idea of what to say. After the meeting I was left with the most peculiar feeling; I felt relaxed and happy even though I'd been talking about things that stress me out (e.g. dissertation/FYP/whatever you want to call it).

Towards the end of semester 1 we were slightly bombarded with deadlines, which meant that I ended up practically neglecting my research project for a good month. After all, assignments do come first. When my supervisor sent an email before Christmas asking about progress and if I'd attended a presentation session in the beginning of December it slightly freaked me out. Yes, I'd done that but apart from the presentation I hadn't done much. The response I received from my supervisor was surprising: I wasn't told off for not doing enough, I was told to not worry?! At university it seems like lecturers are more humans and just overall less scary than teachers in high school were. Of course, this is my very subjective experience, but I'm extremely glad about this.

As my second year at university is coming to an end, dissertation has definitely been a topic of discussion for the whole of semester 2. We had to submit preliminary topic ideas around February and we got paired up with supervisors a bit later; I got extremely lucky and got my first choice of supervisor. I am so happy and excited to work on my dissertation with them. The past month has been filled with ethics, proposal, and material creation, but now it seems like everything might be ready? As long as my proposal is deemed as a pass, I can submit my ethics by the May DL I received a green light for my ethics just over a week ago, will be hearing back from the ethics committee within the next few weeks and hopefully have ethical approval before the start of semester 1 in September, which means the start of data collection! It's kind of funny how this whole dissertation process seems like a process akin to getting married/having children/having to get along with a very difficult person — in one moment you're over the moon and ridiculously excited but in the next you feel like defenestrating everything and everyone. But maybe that's what it's all about? Doing research is definitely not a linear process.

Overall, during these past few years at uni I feel like I've finally found "my thing". Doing research is amazing. Presenting at conferences is fun (based on one conference). Learning is great. I'm so glad to be right here right now even though this is not necessarily where I envisaged myself to be ten years ago.

However, Paris is calling in a week (and one day!) and it will be yet another adventure. Not necessarily the greatest times of my life 24/7 but certainly a learning experience and alongside work, it will be filled with more research as per my dissertation research plan.

Year 2 of uni is officially over and the day after tomorrow I'll be heading back to Finland. Thankfully the weather should be nice, Winchester is supposed to have rain for the rest of my stay :|