This February is going to be very busy for us at the Woodhill Park Research Retreat.  We’ve got a series of workshops on offer because it’s the lead-up time to the academic year commencing.  Typically, whenever a person takes the plunge to either enrol in a masters thesis course or in a doctorate, they enter the programme with substantial enthusiasm and a surfeit of gusto and bravado.  But relatively quickly, most candidates discover that it’s not that easy: constructing a cogent, pithy, hitherto unexplored thesis statement that can provide an entry ticket to the higher echelons of study within any university is a mighty challenge.  Candidates soon become torn between the urge to address an intellectual challenge, an itch within the brain, as opposed to maintaining their often comfortable existence.  Is it better to stretch the mind at a computer screen or to let it slumber on the couch in front of the television?  Each involves sitting and each involves digital images.

Supervisors too are also typically torn in two directions.  They shrug, in the nicest of ways, at the fallacious thinking frequently proffered by a potential candidate.  They ponder on the candidate’s suitability to even attempt the challenge for which they have volunteered.  Might it not be simpler to guide them, tactfully, away from such matters – to return them to the couch? 

But at the same time, a thesis supervisor knows that immersion in postgraduate supervision is probably amongst the most rewarding and challenging of all scholastic challenges: it is teaching at its hardest, it is rewarding because of its intensity and it’s the life-blood of continuity of tertiary establishments.  It’s important. 

I’ve come to the unsurprising conclusion that there are some flaws in the current system.  That's one reason for determining that we’re going to offer a suite of workshops specifically geared towards helping those who have decided to enrol for postgraduate studies, and in particular, for those who are embarking upon thesis work. 

I’m quite sure that many folk who enrol in a thesis have a very lean understanding of what is involved.  They’ve likely been told that the need to have family or whānau on board is absolutely pivotal; in fact it’s so crucial that its importance cannot be overstated!  Without their support, the journey becomes far, far more challenging and even more fraught with challenges.  But the probability is that at the time of enrolment, there is likely to be very little appreciation indeed of this utterly important factor.  Hence, determining what, if any support there is for the aspiring thesis candidate by both family members and employers is a matter that a thorough supervisor should raise and probe as deeply as need be. 

Of course becoming armed with a series of scholastic attributes is also important (but not nearly as important as having familial support).  It’s not just about writing engagingly with clarity, and it’s not merely about designing surveys and experiments and the like or even interviewing in order to gather data.  Nor is it just about analysing, and reading and thinking about data so that they become as one with the candidate.  And neither is it only about wallowing in theories, loads of them.  

It’s about all of those things together.  It’s also about connecting such matters by applying a range of skills; skills which enable links, often tenuous to be made between often disparate phenomena.  It’s about realising just how much more puzzling the matter is than was first thought.  It’s at once puzzle dissection and enigma creation.  It’s applied thinking and questioning and it’s not always about finding solutions no matter how probing the research imagination.

In sum, it’s the capacity to think, to recognise and reorganise knowledge that matters.  This ideally happens in concert with applying academic crafts and mechanical research skills which, together with continuous thinking, inexorably transform the candidate into a scholar. 

It takes time, and during that time-consuming journey, only a few candidates will bother to intentionally acquire a tool-kit full of skills: not every candidate will learn speed reading and only a handful will learn how to read strategically.  Regularly using referencing data-bases will not necessarily become their domain.  And very few indeed will become superbly proficient at finding their way around a word-processing programme.  Regrettably, even fewer will learn how to use software applications which can deepen their capacity to analyse complex data sets. 

Now those who know me well enough will quite rightly point out that I’m biased in this matter and I freely admit that I am.  I’m biased towards equipping people who wish to exercise their mind with a range of resources which can make their journey enjoyable in its worth and worthwhile because it’s enjoyable.  That’s why we’ve established the Woodhill Park Research Retreat and that’s why we’ve devised a suite of workshops especially designed to meet the needs of beginning thesis candidates. 

To learn more about them, just click here and you'll be taken to the schedule of workshops we’ve planned for the first semester of 2012. 

But to find out about the details of specific courses, just click on your choice of the list of workshops nominated below: