In this podcast, Peter Alkema interviewed Alessandra who finished her degree recently. She shared how The Students Success Coach helped her finish the degree.

Moreover, she talked about how her failures became her strength.

In this podcast, you will learn a lot of things that will help you finish your degree and have a successful career.

How to Improve Student Success Rate?

Alessandra was passionate about understanding how to improve other student’s success rates. She spent few extra years finishing her undergraduate degree. Hence, she wanted to solve the problem of so many students failing or dropping out and jumped at the chance to do master’s level research using qualitative methods.

Alessandra realized that previous research was largely quantitative and didn’t provide the human insights that she was looking for. She urges students to speak to people to get support and encouragement. Also, put in place “hard deadlines” that keep yourself accountable for making progress.

Does Cultural Issues Have a Role in Student Success?

Cultural issues also play a big role in student success with many students being the first in their families to study at a university. She felt fortunate to be in a class group and joining the running team. However, students might tend to isolate themselves in research and this is a big risk.

It’s also important to get a mentor, coach, or at least someone who has walked the same path. They can give you the insights you need. Students are often scared to ask their lecturer questions. They need a safe space to ask questions and interact to get the insights and support they need.

How Writing Helped Her Succeed?

Her own success was largely due to reading a huge volume and making notes with generative writing which served her well later on in her studies. She found her thematic, mixed methods research very interesting. She wanted to spend more time analyzing her incredible data set but opted to get finished. Alessandra is looking forward to coming back to the topic with increased experience in the industry and approaching it with a data science approach.

Her advice to students in the long hard road of writing their thesis is that

“it will finish”

and they must trust the process. Engage with their supervisors and push through. She would love to do a Ph.D. at some stage and promised to come back on the show to give us all an update.

Here is the complete podcast: