Getting Started

I think that the university's expectations of postgrads are a real leap up from where we see students as being when they finish their undergraduate studies. When I think about it in terms of my own students, I expect that they'll complete their postgraduate studies possessing a whole raft of skills. On one level there'll be an expectation that they've achieved a high level of professional expertise on a practical level in the area that I helped them to learn about. But also that they'll expect a very high degree of conceptual and theoretical understanding of the area, which they can apply to the professional area along with their practical understandings. Strongly associated with that is that they'll learn how to do research, so how they can go out and find out information about a particular content or topic area, and then again linked to that is that they will develop the capacity to represent that knowledge in some way, so whether that's written in the form of an assignment or report, or whether it's presented visually in some way, or in an oral presentation; that they can actually demonstrate their understanding of that knowledge. The benefits of that are many, but one of the main things is that they can then go and apply that in their real life work situation, so that knowledge travels with them, and having developed the capacity to research independently, they can then do that in their future life as well, becoming independent learners.