This post is partly a response to Matthias‘ Post Series Kick-Off – Working at the University and partly an extension of it, adding my personal view on the topics mentioned by Matthias.
My path to working as a research assistant was a little bit different than for Matthias. I started working as a part-time employee parallel to my master studies in the group that I later joined as research assistant: the MATSE education group at the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University. Therefore, I was quite aware how working in this group was like. However, no one was doing research in the MATSE group and I didn’t do research from the start either. Everything was focused only on teaching (computer science and math) and at first I was quite happy with that. But the more I dived into teaching, and especially assessment, the more I saw that things were not all good. Particularly doing assessment on paper, while teaching in a digital setting (LMS, PowerPoint, IDEs for programming, …) and using computers in the (programming) tutorials, bothered me a lot. The following picture from the draft of my PhD thesis illustrates that.
Therefore, I decided that I needed to do something about that. That was when I started pursuing a Ph.D. focusing on e-Assessment.
Just like Matthias, I had no idea what being a researcher means. And I would totally agree that I sometimes still don’t know today, after nearly four years of … well, some people may call it research. In difference to a „regular“ Ph.D. student I have more teaching duties, because that’s what I initially joined the MATSE group for. That obviously influences how I work towards my PhD. Meanwhile I had the opportunity to present my work at several international conferences. Based on the experiences there and talks that I had with colleagues, I’m actually not quite sure whether there is the researcher, or if the creativity needed to achieve interesting results does not necessarily lead to a manifold of different approaches to research, co-existing and stimulating each other.