Kitchen Incident

As requested by Rhed and Leonora and as a supplement to my profile Statement #2:

Last October, when I was inducting students on the first day of their research degree, VC popped an interesting question just as I was showing them the kitchen facilities and tea arrangements:

-Are we considered staff or students?

Well, the matter is that for this level, it is not easy to discern. As teachers, we want students to be independent learners, to obtain an original contribution to knowledge in a field neither of us can help them to fully understand, to network and talk to world specialists in their subject, to be able to assess what they need when they need it. This evidently goes beyond the term student.

Having said so, however, the girl and the boy I was showing around will have to pass assignments, produce reports, have tutorials, be assessed, have funding support, feel their workloads are too much, be dragged to lessons when they would be doing something else… Just like in a student framework.

All this crossed my mind in a split second and I had to compromise and reply ‘both’. But I didn’t explain to him what that word really meant. I felt as though if I had, he would have turned away and never come back. When I started working at Wimbledon, it took me a good couple of years to understand what research degrees were about and, even when I more or less grasped its principle, I certainly didn’t want to do one. There were too many tensions and too many grey areas. Only the field made me decide; the problems I encountered within seduction theory.

I still think research degree students are in a difficult position: they have to produce high-level work without a course structure as such. And they have to make the leap by themselves, as the majority of our students come straight from their MAs. In a way, I have it easy: I know what I am in for and I sort of accept the consequences with resignation.

My answer to VC was wishy-washy. He will be able to use our kitchen facilities and informally talk to anyone that happens to be in the area. Still, the Research Degrees Committee will talk about his progress as a student and he won’t have access but to a small ‘official’ part of what was said. I suppose the guy that raised the issue at the UKGrad conference was right. They not ‘both’, but ’neither’. They are simply researchers, something mid-way between staff and student, with hurdles from both sides. At least, I can make sure they have plenty of tea.