The Honours Year—A Reflection on the Experience from Four Former Students

Abstract

An honours year is an introduction to new relationships with supervisors, fellow students, research participants and, importantly, yourself. This paper is based upon the experiences of four former Australian honours students who felt there was a distinct lack of guidance for first-time researchers in the available academic literature. In this paper, we explore the research experiences, processes and relationships that characterize the honours year including, working with theoretical frameworks and the student–supervisor relationship, providing examples from our own experience. We conclude by considering the ethical implications of the research and the power and ethical obligations of the researcher.

Keywords:

• Honours
• Student experience
• Supervision
• Undergraduate research
• Ethics

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of a challenging but highly fulfilling year of honours research which would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many people. We would like to thank our honours supervisors Professor Richie Howitt, Dr Sandie Suchet-Pearson and Associate Professor Kevin McCracken for their patience, expert guidance and inspiration throughout our honours years and their ongoing support. We would also like to thank all those who participated in our honours research for their time and energy, without them our research would not have been possible and we would be unable to share our experiences with other researchers. Finally, we would like to thank Dr Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Professor Richie Howitt and fellow honours student Mitchell Lendrum for their input into and review of this paper. SR conceived the idea for this paper and contributed to writing it up. LB, PC and JK contributed to writing the paper. All authors read and approvedthe final manuscript.