There are many reasons why you should do the Master of Research here at Western
Sydney University. The first is the interdisciplinary nature of the degree.
When you begin your journey in a Master of Research you'll sit in a room with people
and other students from all over the place, all over across the University
so if you're studying philosophy you'll be seeing next to engineers or
people doing medical science and when you come together when you bring people
together from all these different backgrounds you actually learn to see
the world differently. You learn to communicate across disciplines,
communicate with people that have very different views of the world to you and
that's an incredibly powerful skill to have. I chose the Master of Research
because I thought it would be a really good program to kind of get me prepared
for a PhD. I really wanted to kind of pursue research as a career and I
thought that it was a nice holistic degree and multidisciplinary as well
which could help my research further and kind of prepare me for what research
culture was going to be like.
I think the Master of Research is suitable for anybody
because you can really take whatever research you want to do from whatever
field and we're in a classroom with people from the Medical Sciences and
from STEM, there were people from Humanities. Everyone's ideas were
relevant and it was so important to be able to share that. The kind of
people who should be thinking about undertaking a Master of Research or
any kind of research degree is someone who feels like their thirst for
knowledge remains unquenched at the end of their undergraduate degree. Someone
who, you know, feels like they've touched or just kind of scraped the
surface of what there is to know out there. You can do the best research in the
world, but if it sits on a shelf somewhere in the shape of a thesis
you'll be ignored. The question is how do you take that thesis and communicate it,
how do you take your findings, communicate them, and make sure that they
have impact. The MRes made me a better communicator, particularly with my
writing. I became a really proficient writer
both academically and for a public audience, and that's probably really helped me in
my PhD now, communicate what my research is about to people and also writing a thesis.
One of the things that when I came in board with this degree that I
asked a lot of my colleagues about was what do you wish you'd been taught when
you went through Honours and when you went through your PhD program that you
learned the hard way in the years afterwards, and the most dominant theme
in the responses to that question was I wish I'd been told what research was
really like, I wish somebody told me what the process of going through a research
project and trying to build and maintain a career in research was really like.
It's also really important in terms of being a researcher for the 21st century
and being able to effectively communicate the research findings and
what you want to do and this is all about making sure that your research has
impact not only within an academic sphere but also has an impact in the
real world. Getting a Master of Research it doesn't only qualify you to do work
in a specific disciplinary area, but we're pretty sure that any employer
if they understand what it is that you've been put through, the kind of
training that you've been put through in the Master of Research, they are going to see that
you're a person who can solve problems, who can work independently, who can think
creatively. This is designed specifically to be a research pathway, this is not
meant to finish your research career or be the culmination of your research
career, we want you to take these skills and use your research to
contribute to the world at large, so it is the sort of thing that whether you
want to be a researcher in the private sector or the public sector, this is the
degree that will take you there. One of the things that we've found with people
entering into PhD programs without this kind of training
is that suddenly having to write a huge amount to support and then defend your
thesis is quite daunting, and the Master of Research gives you an opportunity to
experience what writing a substantial document is like, but also the training
so that you're going into a PhD program with the experience of already having
mounted an argument in defense of a thesis. We think it's invaluable and that
it makes you a much, much stronger PhD candidate, not just here at Western
Sydney but in any other PhD program around the world. And will realistically
help you in whatever employment you engage in for the rest of your life. Simultaneously you
improve your research skills and your disciplinary knowledge, so while you're
improving all the research skills you need to be an excellent
researcher, you're also getting a chance to deep dive into the areas that
you're most interested in, the type of knowledge that you really want to follow
and that's really exciting. So those two skills are taught simultaneously and it's
actually one of the great things about being here at this University. In the
Master of Research, in a full-time trajectory, what you have is two years of
full-time study to complete. And this means that you get time to develop ideas, time
to deepen your understanding of your field of research, and time to ask other
questions, deeper questions, about your research problem to figure out, you know
why it matters or how it can contribute to our understanding of certain things,
so for me time is the big advantage of the Master of Research.
I've worked with students that were doing an Honours program and I think one of the
hardest things for them is managing coursework and their thesis at the
same time, it's very stressful. We had an extra year when we were doing coursework
to develop our ideas and refine them and think about what approach we wanted to
take and to tease with the different ideas of what might work and what might
not, and I think that when we get to our thesis year then we're more confident,
and even attending conferences and speaking to people, you can speak about
your research in a way that it makes you sound like you're really, really
confident and you know exactly what you're doing. When I first kind of was
thinking about doing the MRes, it was a little bit daunting. I'm like oh I could do
an Honours and that's one year, why am I gonna spend two years kind of doing this
stuff, but looking back I'm really happy because, because it's multi-disciplinary
I learnt about lots of different things that I wouldn't have known about otherwise,
qualitative research over quantitative research and things like this. I also
gained expertise in my research area, specialised expertise which is really
helpful and learnt how to manage a project on my own for nine months, so I
think those skills have kind of really helped me out and looking back I'm happy
I chose that option rather than the easy kind of one-year option because now I'm
a better researcher for it. There's a lot of help for students. I'm a first in family student, so for
me coming to Western was a big step and there was a lot of support and I knew
that doing my postgrad that I would have the same support as what I did in my
undergrad. If you've got just an inkling of a passion for research, you should
definitely do the MRes. That's probably one of the things I got out of
it the most, is I became much more passionate about research. I chose the MRes
because I wanted to do research as a career, but I didn't realise how excited
I would be about research after I had completed the MRes. A lot of people think
that research is simply reading something or asking questions. Research
is about cultivating curiosity and this is a fascinating part of doing a
research degree such as a Master of Research, that you get to cultivate this
curiosity, but not only in the area you're interested in, but working with
people from different disciplines means that you all take a journey
together to see the world differently and learn so much more.