Supervising ISMs “Hands-On”

There is a structure. When I was less experienced, I would just say “do your own thing”. But I found that if I say that, most people doing ISMs are Year 2 or 3 and they haven’t taken on big projects like Honours Thesis (HT). They aren’t experienced and would be a bit lost in getting started on the research. But in an ISM, it’s just one module and don’t aim for originality. If you have originality, great! But even HTs aren’t that original and may only be a new way of looking at things. For just one module, don’t pitch yourself too high.

What I ask them is: “If you’re interested in this topic, has there been a lot of work done on it?” If there are 16 articles posted on food in Singapore, is there a niche you can cover? Some articles will talk about Malay food, some about food blogs, and some about Singapore Tourism Board. Is there something else for you to look at that hasn’t been overdone? Once students have discovered a possible niche area, let’s say vegetarian food, then I ask “what are your sources?” Even if a topic is very exciting, it’s a waste of time if there is no way of doing research. What’s your potential thesis statement, what are you trying to discover about vegetarian food, what’s different that you can contribute? You might say, “Vegetarianism is a special niche in food reviews and previously, a lot of vegetarians are older Buddhists or those with health issues. I’m trying to uncover the newer demographics of who are becoming vegetarians.” Then I would ask again, what are your sources? You need things like a literature review and conceptual framework, where are you going to get those? You’ll need to go online to look for sources.

You may suspect that young people are becoming vegetarian because of sustainability or health reasons and think of interviewing your friends. Then, how many people should you be interviewing, what is the mix, and are different races and genders represented? When you do this, you can identify the different niches that you’re targeting.

I try to structure my supervision such that every 3 weeks my students have to report or feedback to me on how much they have done. If not, it will be bad for both of us if at the end of the semester, you haven’t written anything and we have to scramble to get something out. This happened to a student I supervised in the past when I was too free and easy. So now I will look through the research proposal and help students structure when they want to do what.

Students doing ISM don’t have enough experience. Research is consistent. You can’t rush research at the end with last-minute work, the product and the process will be unsatisfactory. Regular check-ins are my way of checking that they’re doing consistent work and not doing any last-minute work. ISM is supposed to be one semester’s worth of work, it’s not designed to be rushed at the end of the semester. The academic weight is equivalent to a regular module, just that you do it one-on-one and you’re doing research on a topic that you are passionate about.

I guide them more. When my students choose me as a supervisor, I know they know I’m more hands-on. I would also warn them about my style, and if you don’t like that working style, you should find someone else – no sore feelings.

When I was in history, I had a student who wanted me to supervise his honours thesis and I considered supervising him. But I told him my working style is more hands-on and he should find another person if he didn’t want that working style. However, by the end of the semester, he came to me and said he should’ve gone for me because he needed the guidance. Working style is very important and you have to be upfront about your preferences, to find someone who is more in tune with your style.

I would say we have to schedule regular meetings: every three weeks, we will meet. I don’t want you to only come to me in the tenth week and have done nothing and end up in hysterics. That’s a poor learning process because in HT and PhD you don’t have that luxury. Research work can be very frustrating, and you have to mirror that process because some of you will be going to do graduate studies. In your first experience, you shouldn’t have free rein to put it aside until the tenth week. I’m not just helping you assess the content, but also helping you see that research is a process that you have to continuously do as time goes on in the semester. I guide you and help you structure. Most students who come to me for supervision have experienced my class, or know friends who have taken my class, so they know my working style and expectations.

Then, if you’re doing a topic in which I have a contact, I also give you the contact. I also suggest sources that could be useful. “Hands-on” is not putting you out there to do your own research. I put pointers in your way and if you don’t want to pursue that, I’m not going to hold that against you. I’ve had supervisors before who gave very little guidance or pointers for my research, and it was quite painful as a student who was new to doing research.

However, I don’t force you to write what I think, since the final paper is your own. There are supervisors that have very strong opinions on the topic you’re researching and they want you to adjust your topic towards their own conclusion. Despite the fact that I’m very opinionated, your own academic output is your own academic output. Personally, I can say, “not everyone agrees with this, you may want to consider this other perspective” or “this aspect is missing from your analysis” but I won’t tell you what to write.

Frankly speaking, as long as you have a PhD and some research experience, you can supervise an ISM. Of course, I can’t do mathematics or accounting, I’m under no illusion of my competencies. I don’t think I’ve ever supervised an ISM that deals with quantitative data, but that’s also because no one has approached me with such a topic. It’s a process of mutual selection, and people have to decide whether they want to be supervised by or learn something from me. Most of my ISM students have taken my class before, so I don’t usually reject it due to the topic.

In the beginning, it’s to help you define the topic and help you find sources. Towards the end, there would be multiple readings of the draft. For PhD theses, I myself am not going to mark the final product, so I have to make sure it’s as airtight as possible; the external markers can pick at all kinds of things. For ISMs is different, but I’ll read the draft and question the student, asking questions and helping them refine what they really mean. There’s also a matter of upholding standards, since submitted ISMs do get audited by the higher-ups.

I don’t do additional research. For a PhD, I need to know enough about the topic to know what kind of questions are important enough to ask. Let’s say hypothetically, someone wants to research US-China relations in the 1970s. I have to know the characters, context, and sources. If my student hasn’t done enough of a particular source or completely left out a source, I’ll say “Where’s that source? It’s not there; do something about it.” Even if I haven’t read all the sources out there, I’ll have at least sampled them. I’ll know “hey, Kissinger wrote about 6 or 7 memoirs but you only cited 1 of them”. If however, someone comes to me and wants to research Franco-German relationships in the third decade of the 20th century, I don’t know enough about the topic and the sources.

For ISMs this has been less of a problem. So far, I’ve done a lot of Singaporean topics and I read widely on Singapore’s history, so I have a pretty good idea of research topics in Singapore. Just yesterday, I was talking to a student in my new class and I was very open that I’m not a curator. Still, when Siang talks about museum studies I know what she’s talking about. I can contribute to the module not because I specialise in curation and museums, but just that I love museums.

If there’s something I don’t know anything about, like an ISM topic on National Service, I have relatives who have done NS before and I taught at SAFTI before, so I know enough about NS to supervise. I can’t think of a Singapore topic where I would say “no way, I can’t supervise that”. Maybe, if someone asked me about the practice of Hinduism in Singapore, I would think twice. By virtue of living here and having life experiences here, I am able to do most Singapore topics.

It’s not that I need to have academic knowledge of the field, but I just need to have some inkling of what that research entails. I can ask, “If you want to do Buddhism or Hinduism, what aspect are you talking about?” If a student says she wants to look at how Buddhism treats females or how females treat their faith, I’ll ask if there are sources she can consult or relatives in the faith. I can turn it into a sociological study, but it cannot be a purely religious study because that’s not my area of specialisation.

Something that happens quite often is that the topic is more suited for a HT and you cannot do it in just one ISM. If they can cut the content down, then I will supervise. Based on years of supervision, I can tell if the topic is too big.

Sometimes there’s also just that there are no sources. When I just joined NUS History in 2000, I had a student who wanted to do Singapore films about Singapore. There weren’t enough Singapore films that we could find, so I consulted someone who’s familiar with the Singapore film scene and the people in it. She said that for a HT, there isn’t enough material out there. Even if that student was unhappy, there’s just not enough material to fill the space of a HT.

I have another experience in History: a student wanted to do US-China relations from 1949 to 1980. That’s 30 years and a HT is only 15,000 words, so every year gets only 200 words, which isn’t enough! In History, the time frame matters, and 30 years is definitely too long for an ISM.

For most of you, it’s your first real research project. I never had a student that went too small for the topic; it’s always going too big. Students starting on the ISM need to know that part of the skill in research is to narrow the topic down, if not in terms of years, then in terms of demographics. Otherwise, you would be making general statements which you can write without doing any research. You can’t say anything meaningful. Almost 100% of the time it would be a matter of asking “how do you intend to cover 30 years in 15,000 words?”. People get very ambitious but you cannot cover so many aspects.

Besides narrowing down the topic, another mark of a good researcher is not to go in with a preconception or set idea of what the topic should be. I once supervised a student who started an ISM with an idea and was very sold on it. But after she started looking for sources she found lots of material that had not been analysed and she decided to change the topic on her own initiative. She ended up doing very well and went on to do graduate studies. You can and should let the material change your mind.

You don’t need to make a big contribution to the literature, but you want to do some independent thinking. If there are many studies covering the same thing, then your ISM is just a summary or literature review. For example, Chua Beng Huat has written extensively on public housing. If you do an ISM on him, you’ll just end up summarising his views, which is not very useful. Now if you pick Chua Beng Huat and take 3 of his 6 articles, and take 3 articles from another author and analyse them, that’s something you can do. No one cares about synthesising an author’s work, people have moved on with regard to Singapore public housing.

I think humanities students tend to be more detail-oriented. For business students, they’re very good at seeing the big picture but when it comes to content details, they’re not as trained in that area. I think business people have good vision and say “this is an interesting topic”, but they don’t have as much skill at excavating content as humanities students have. They haven’t had the experience, so I have to tell them what to do.

Most of you like to do current topics. In the past I was still teaching in History, so most students came to me with more history-related topics. But I haven’t taught there since 2017 so most of you don’t know me as a history professor, just as a professor who teaches MOAN. I do get a mix of history and non-history topics.

The one thing I have to say honestly is that I learn things that I didn’t know in almost every ISM. I like learning new things because it fires my neurones to go in different directions. I prefer, as I get older, to learn new things and keep active. If you come to me with a topic I’m unfamiliar about, I get excited because I myself benefit from it. I try to push students in directions that allow them to say something new or something different. Then they will do the research, come back to me, and I’ll get the moment of “oh, I didn’t know that!”

There was a USP and History student who wanted to research the Jewish community in Singapore for her ISM, and in this experience, I learned something that helped me change the way that I looked at Singapore. She went to the law library to look at real estate deeds and found that in the 19th century in Singapore, the largest group of landowners after the British were actually the Jews, not the Chinese! What happened was that after the Second World War, the rich Jews went to Israel or America, so there are we don’t see the presence of the rich Jews in Singapore today. It taught me that my assumptions of “rich Chinese Towkay own a lot of land” in the colonial period were wrong. That was a very interesting learning point.