Powerful open platform supports graduation process for master’s students
Trouble selecting a thesis topic, lack of motivation and dealing with a language barrier. These are just some of the challenges master’s students face when it comes to the graduation process. Through the GoGrad project, a team of students and staff in the Construction Management and Engineering (CME) programme at TU Delft’s Faculty of Civil Engineering & Geosciences (CEG) have created an open platform that aims to help students deal with their challenges, supporting the graduation process.
The delay dilemma
In theory, the CME master’s graduation project should take seven months from start to finish. But according to Marian Bosch-Rekveldt, Associate Professor of Project Management (CEG), they started to notice more and more CME students dealing with delays. She enlisted the help of the CME study association and the GoGrad project was launched in January 2022.
It would take a diverse team of students with a passion for education to get the best results, said Bosch-Rekveldt, but also people from different stages in the CME master’s journey. “Including students from different years meant they could bring their own experiences,” she said. “Some who have faced challenges already and some new students who haven’t faced challenges yet but could benefit from the process.” After receiving a lot of interest, she assembled a team of five master’s student teaching assistants - Menouschka Baldew, Ekavi Chalazia, Himanshu Patel, Vikas Sharma, and Vasiliki Tsioni. “From the first year, there is a huge hype about the master’s thesis,” said Patel. “When I came to TU Delft, I heard that you have to start early and there are many challenges. So, when I got this opportunity, I thought I could learn a lot before my master’s thesis and that would be helpful.”
We had a call in the faculty for developing new Open Educational Resources (OERs) and I thought that would be a great way to help students address the different kinds of difficulties that they face during the graduation process.
Marian Bosch-Rekveldt, Associate Professor of Project Management (CEG)
Identifying challenges
The starting point was to identify the specific challenges that contribute to study delays. In order to do that, the GoGrad team did a survey to gather insights and experience from both current and former CME students. Out of 124 respondents, 88 (71%) stated that they faced or are facing challenges during their graduation process. The team also learned that only one quarter of the students who had started their thesis project completed it within the desired timeframe of seven months. And the data showed that challenges varied, some starting in the first few weeks of the graduation project while others presented during the final stages.
The challenges mentioned most often and rated highly in terms of impact included things like research questions and/or the scope of research not being clearly defined, scheduling meetings with supervisors taking too much time, and difficulty in selecting a thesis topic. But it was an eye opener to learn that feeling lost during the process was the highest rated challenge.
That worried me. I think that challenge is part of the game and you don’t have to be afraid to encounter challenges because they spark learning. But the moment ‘feeling lost during the process’ scores that high, that is a problem. That’s when we have the task to support the students and facilitate more than we apparently have so far.
Marian Bosch-Rekveldt, Associate Professor of Project Management (CEG)
An open platform
Using the data from the survey, the GoGrad team set out to analyse the causes and consequences of the challenges in order to come up with creative solutions. The team chose a webpage as the platform to present their solutions, making it easily and openly available to anyone. They grouped the main findings from their research into five themes: personal competences, university resources, company resources, time management and thesis topic selection. “In order to make it easier to understand, we tried to cluster things,” said Ekavi. “What is actually a challenge related to the process of graduation, what is related to approaching a company to collaborate for your graduation, what’s a challenge related to data that you need for your graduation, or how do you find your committee?”
Under each of the five themes, there are common questions that might arise related to the CME graduation process. The team then compiled detailed responses, advice and links to resources that can help students navigate the entire graduation process. In addition, there are video contributions from CME students and alums who share their personal experiences with graduation challenges and how they managed them. “I think that’s really powerful because a teacher can tell you something, but it’s received differently when a student shares it,” said Bosch-Rekveldt. The GoGrad platform lets students see that others have faced challenges as well and learning from those experiences helps them stay on track. If questions arise that have not been answered, there is also an option to contact a TA via the platform.
Value added
GoGrad was officially introduced in September to the first year CME students as part of the introduction presentations for the 2022-2023 academic year. Going forward, it has been included as a regular part of the CME master’s thesis preparation. And in addition to helping students, the platform can be a valuable resource for academic staff advising students when they might not be familiar with all of the details related to graduation themselves.
As for the outcome of GoGrad, the decision to include students at different stages of their master’s was critical, said Sharma, who graduated last year and now works as a consultant for Deloitte. “We had to do a lot of brainstorming and that was only possible because we had this mix of teammates with different perspectives and different understandings,” he said. “Because of that, we were able identify solutions that were appropriate for all of us and that is the nitty gritty of our portal. Our solutions are quite thorough.”
Bosch-Rekveldt added: “The input and the effort of the students was invaluable. Without them, we couldn’t have done it. We hope that GoGrad will support current and future CME students to find a way to tackle the challenges they face and leverage them to their benefit.”