David Macfarlane
All academic study involves extended periods of solitary work, but postgraduate courses most of all. Stepping from relatively structured and supportive bachelor-level courses to master’s and doctoral levels is daunting for many students sometimes overwhelmingly so, as high dropout rates at some institutions demonstrate.
The University of the Western Cape (UWC) this year launched a comprehensive postgraduate support programme, aimed at increasing the numbers of masters’ and doctoral students and encouraging them to complete their studies in the allotted time.
This follows UWC’s identifying of a worrying trend. “Many of the enrolments for postgraduate degrees at UWC are often repeat registrations towards incomplete degrees,” says Professor Nelleke Bak, who heads the university’s Postgraduate Enrolment and Throughput Rate Project (PET).
“The increase in postgraduate enrolment at UWC has recently come under the spotlight … There are 157 doctoral and 902 master’s students,” she says. “However, the number of students graduating has decreased.”
Postgraduate study is “intellectually thrilling and academically demanding”, she says, but can also involve “anxiety, frustration and loneliness”. PET aims to “support both the exciting possibilities of postgraduate studies and research as well as to put in place systems that will help overcome some of the major obstacles to the completion of master’s and doctoral degrees”.
Students, academics and administrative staff are drawn into the PET initiative, which has three goals, says Bak: “Offer the needed support to doctoral and master’s students; draw up criteria to accommodate the supervisor/student relationship; and offer guidelines to examiners.” There will also be “guidelines for faculty officers on how they can play a role”, she says.
Physical support systems include a postgraduate computer room and intranet, and technical support includes a free writing consultancy service, offered by UWC’s Writing Centre, to assist with grammar, punctuation, referencing styles, and so on. Translation, editing and proofreading services are also available.
Ongoing seminars spotlight the kinds of difficulties most postgraduates will encounter at one stage or another: how to manage time between thesis demands, work commitments and family responsibilities; how to overcome writer’s block; how to negotiate the supervision process; how to do a literature review; how to do a case study …
“I have really been motivated by the PET workshops,” says Monique Bennett, a physiology master’s student. “I don’t feel I am alone with my problems; it’s good to know other students have similar problems and that someone is doing something to help.”
It is important “to deepen the research culture at UWC”, says Bak, “especially at a time when the institution feels itself under pressure in a climate of transformation of institutions of higher education … [PET is] an important move in the development of the university’s reputation.”