Getting help ...
Your responsibilities
Your tutor
Relating to your tutor
How tutors help
Preparing for interviews
Your responsibilities
Students at this level are expected to be autonomous self-starters who are responsible for their own work. In the end, it is the your who is assessed, not your tutor.
As a student, you are responsible to:
- find your own resources
- initiate and defend your own original ideas
- commit your work to writing
- report regularly. The tutor might prefer either weekly or fortnightly during semester. When you start getting your work into writing, you should email drafts of your recent papers.
- proof-read all your own spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.
- ask for help if you get stuck.
In extreme cases, a student who is too dependent on the supervisor to do their own work might be asked to transfer to another program.
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Your tutor
At this level, you should be able to manage your own learning.
The main task of tutor is to maintain the institution’s standards and procedures. This includes ensuring:
- the authenticity of your work
- suitable structure and layout
- correct submission procedures and
- appropriate critical thought
Students are usually surprised to learn that providing help is not the primary responsibility of the tutor.
The tutor might choose to refer to other experts to seek advice on a specialized issue, or get a second opinion on methodology or assessment.
Although it rarely occurs, tutors might take action when a student's work is very different from the required standard. For example, they might suggest transfer to either a lower or higher award, or to an additional award.
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Relating to your tutor
The tutor may take on any of the following roles:
- a colleague
- an adviser, whose advice you might be required to accept
- an administrator
- an assessor
Relationships with tutors are usually close and complex. As a colleague he/she might be a friend with whom you interact and discuss your ideas. He/she might encourage you or (if necessary) give you correction. But as an administrator or assessor, he/she might have considerable power over your work.
Accept that the tutor will look at the work from a more neutral viewpoint. You can't easily check your own work; it is hard to see mistakes in something you wrote yourself that you think is very good.
If a tutor gives a negative critique of some of your work, do not take it as a personal attack. Perhaps you need to work on corrections. (Remember that it is the final product that is assessed, not mistakes in the preliminary drafts.)
More often, a mistake in your work is an opportunity for revision. It might only be that your draft still needs polishing. Perhaps you overlooked something important or included something that should have been omitted.
The tutor-student relationship sometimes sours. This might be through fundamentally different opinions, lack of contact, misunderstandings through emails, or critique of work. As it is not normally permitted to change your tutor, your first course of action should be to repair the relationship.
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How tutors help
The tutor's role often varies according to the stage of the project:
- You might be more an expert than the tutor when working through some practicalities of the fieldwork situation.
- The supervisor will be more expert in methodology, validity of design and structure, and presentation.
Almost all students need tutor help at some stage of their projects. Tutor help might involve:
- liaising with administration for you
- encouraging you
- tracking your progress
- giving you extra reading
- acting as a sounding board so you can develop your own ideas
- asking you leading questions
- providing interaction to draw out important ideas
- asking about apparent inadequacies or mistakes
- providing a critique of your work
- sorting out difficulties
- recommending particular courses of action
- making firm decisions when the success of the project is at stake.
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Preparing for interviews
If you have regular personal or telephone interviews with a tutor, you need to prepare proactively:
- check that the time and location is suitable
- read any relevant material beforehand
- email your written work beforehand, so that the supervisor has time read it and give it appropriate reflection before your interview
- list your questions and ideas
- plan your next step
Then, during the interview, keep to the allotted time, usually 60 or 90 minutes.
If you use email "interviews", the same kind of guidelines also apply. It will probably pay to write rough drafts of your questions and reflect on them for a few days. You might realize some of the answers yourself, find a better way to ask the question, or find that another underlying question is the real issue.
In any case, it is better to ask for help than to become increasingly frustrated, and email is a better medium than most to ask for help when you need it.
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