Sydney Life

Getting ethics approval for your Honours thesis is serious business. So is finding a solution to procrastinating...

I have been slaving away at the 20-page questionnaire that is the Human Ethics Committee Approval application form. It is one meaty document which will decide whether or not my Honours research proposal goes ahead (and let's me be released into societal research wilderness) or gets knocked back.

To complete a research ethics approval form, it is clear that you actually need to know what your research is going to be about. That has been the biggest hurdle so far. Actually picking a topic that's small enough to be manageable but substantial enough to be interesting and valuable for research is probably the hardest part of the process.

The other difficulty is the apparent huge amount of free time you’re deceived into believing you have. As part of my Honours, I have only 6 hours of class time. This deceptively low number of face-to-face contact hours makes you think you’re free to work extra hours and overbook with social commitments. Time management is a difficult skill to master this year; particularly learning to say “no” to yourself and stop procrastinating!

Despite some of the difficulties that accompany the self-driven and self-motivated nature of an Honours year, I can already tell that it's going to be the most educational and rewarding year I've had at uni so far. The chance to contribute to research on a topic you feel is important and worthy of study is pretty cool. It's about finding your voice and the courage to make an authoritative statement about something you've lived and breathed for the best part of a year.

Also, do you remember how your relationship with your teachers changed in Year 12 from how they were in Years 7 - 10? That happens at uni too! Each Honour student gets an individual academic supervisor. That supervisor might be the lecturer they had in first year or even the Dean of a faculty! You develop much closer relationships with the academic staff and your fellow Honours students – you grab coffees with each other, make appointments to meet together and get the chance to have constant feedback on your ideas.

And they don’t call it Honours for nothing! As a student researcher, you’re an academic staff member in-the-making. Honours students are in that lovely grey area between student and research academic, undergraduate and postgraduate, the bold and the beautiful.

I wonder if I'll have Honours withdrawal next year when I return to mere mortal undergraduate status to complete the last two years of my law degree?