A student has asked you to mentor a SoCIETIE Research Project: a piece of work that extends research they are doing with you, or will do with you, into its social, cultural, ethical, economic or technical context. This page explains what that asks of you. The short version is that it should take little of your time, and what it produces should be useful to the research.
The project is described on its own page: Bring Your Own Research Project.
Who this is for
Mostly students in the research-intensive undergraduate degrees — the Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) – Science, the Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) – Humanities and Social Sciences and the Bachelor of Engineering (Research and Development) (Honours) — and later-year students in other degrees who are already working in a research group.
You should already be their supervisor in some capacity: their current research supervisor, their future Honours supervisor, or an academic they have an established research relationship with.
Your role: mentor
We ask three things of you.
- Agree the scope at the start. One conversation, in which you and the student settle what the work is, how it serves the research goals you have already agreed, and what limits it must respect: data, intellectual property, confidentiality, publication. The student writes this up in their Course Pathway Plan.
- Check in a few times. Two or three short conversations across the semester are enough — the kind you would have with any student working in your group.
- Read the output before it is finalised. The student will produce something the research can use: a literature review, an ethics application, a stakeholder map, a policy brief. One round of feedback from you is what makes it fit for that purpose.
What it does not ask of you
- No marking. The SoCIETIE course team assesses the student’s work. Your feedback shapes the output; it is not a grade.
- No new project. The work should sit inside research you are already supervising. If it would pull the student away from their main research, say so — that is exactly the conversation we want to happen at the start.
- No administration with us, beyond answering if we get in touch about the student’s progress.
Ethics approval
If the student’s work involves people — interviews, surveys, workshops, community consultation — it probably falls outside existing approvals and needs a new protocol or a variation. At ANU, a student’s application is created in the Research Ethics Management System by their supervisor, and the Human Research Ethics Committee does not accept high-risk applications led by undergraduates. So where ethics applies, your involvement is required, not optional.
A drafted ethics application is an acceptable output for this project in its own right. The student does not need approval granted within the semester; they do need it before they work with any participants.
See ANU’s Human Ethics guidance and managing an approved protocol.
What your research gets out of it
Work the research needs but would not otherwise get done. A literature review from outside your discipline, the first conversations with a community the research affects, a plain-language version of findings for the people who might act on them. Students are asked to choose work that is genuinely new: what they would do for their thesis anyway does not count.
Questions
Email the SoCIETIE team at McCusker.Education@anu.edu.au.