Developing self-authorship through participation in student research conferences

Abstract

Graduate attributes are a framework of skills, attitudes, values and knowledge that graduates should develop by the end of their degree programmes. Such attributes can be integrated into both curricular and extra-curricular activities. Adopting a largely qualitative approach and using semi-structured interviews, we outline the experiences of Geography, Earth and Environmental Science (GEES) students’ experiences at a national undergraduate research conference and provide evidence for the graduate attributes developed. The students demonstrated intellectual autonomy, repurposing their work for presentation to a multi-disciplinary audience through conversation with and benchmarking against their peers. They gained confidence in expressing their identity as researchers and moved towards self-authorship, consciously balancing the contextual nature of their disciplinary knowledge with intra-personally grounded goals and values. The undergraduate research conference thereby offers students an opportunity to begin to construct their professional identities during their studies, potentially helping them to navigate into their working and wider social lives