Shifting Sands: Narratives of Quality and Compromise in Timely Postgraduate Research Supervision and Outcomes ®

A more highly regulated academic environment impacts student and supervisor expectations about the postgraduate research supervision process. Increased pressure on academics and postgraduate research students to build personal and institutional research profiles while undertaking their other designated academic and life roles, coupled with increasing internationalisation of postgraduate research degrees inevitably impacts supervisors’ and students’ supervision experiences. This, in turn, impacts the quality of supervision and students’ work. The aim of this paper is to generate further debate and research about postgraduate research supervision issues encountered over many years by supervisors, students and support service personnel as they strive—mostly together but often very much individually—to ensure worthy presentation and dissemination of the final research output. The paper presents narratives from supervisors, students and higher degree research editors in response to the broad research question: What, from your experience, are the major challenges to working effectively to achieve successful, timely postgraduate research outcomes? Issues discussed include: supervisor-student relationships; power differentials; international students; time; personal and professional principles and cultures; supervisor, student and institutional expectations; student and supervisor agency and resilience; policies; feedback; and finance. Discussion takes the form of commentary followed by a brief summary of lessons learned from each narrative, linked to relevant literature on narrative inquiry and doctoral research. The key stakeholders who have contributed their experiences to this paper with the objective of improving the supervision process conclude that achieving successful postgraduate research outcomes is very much a case of ‘survival of the fittest’.