The Next Graduate: International collaboration

Assorted information:

The student has approximately a year left in his program. It is formally split between his university in his home country, and this university in Finland. He is approximately eight months into his research. Although there are other supervisors involved, his primary supervisor is at this university. The student will return to his home country for the summer within the month. Before the student leaves, I would like to have a meeting with him and his supervisor.

The student had asked about paraphrasing. He does that successfully in several other languages. He was frustrated with trying to paraphrase another author's write-up of (basically) a CRC Handbook entry for a compound, and a paragraph from another author's literature review. His approach was to reword texts rather than to rewrite them in his own words. I suggested that he take more/better notes (he acknowledges that he does not remember in detail some articles he read in the fall), and paraphrase from those notes the points that relate to the research and arguments he is reporting. I also pointed out that simply rephrasing a review section could mean that he's missing out on details that the review author did not pick out, because the review was written from a different approach for a different purpose. He will try some different approaches this week.

The student has ambitions to do PhD research after completing this degree. I pointed out that it would be undesirable for him to miss important papers via his shortcut through review. I will possibly show him Booth, Williams and Colomb re: argumentation next week.

I've read and returned the student's methods section. It's good but incomplete. Prepositions are a concern, as is repetition, but the ideas are clear. The student uses a foreign version of Word, which apparently lacks English spell-check. Because the student will complete the writing from a different country, I will have to provide feedback via PDFs with scanned pages of my hand-written comments (we're trying this today), or annotated PDFs from his source files (we'll try this later this week). We should figure out a Skype thing also. Interestingly, at least half my comments are about the science.