What two student teams found
In spring 2021, two student teams at the University of St. Gallen's Institute of Information Management (under Prof. Jan Marco Leimeister), working on the Research Stride digital companion project, independently studied supervisors' and students' experience of the thesis process. Their findings were synthesized into the challenges collected here — eleven from each side.
Eleven challenges students face
Choice of topic
Choosing a thesis topic feels overwhelming when students search for personal preference instead of relevance. Reframing the task — find an audience, understand its problems, define a contribution — turns an open-ended search into a tractable one.
Data access
Students are often blindsided when the data their research question demands turns out to be inaccessible — a problem rooted not in the middle of the project, but in how the question was framed at the very start. Research questions should be shaped around realistically accessible data from day one.
Emotions
Thesis work triggers real emotional swings, and comparing progress with peers usually deepens rather than eases them. Protecting energy levels, avoiding comparison, and keeping some distance between personal and researcher identity keeps the rollercoaster manageable.
How to do it
Many students freeze at the outset, unsure which project decisions are truly theirs to make versus predetermined by their institution or field. Clarifying a goal, a generic path toward it, and which decisions are actually open restores momentum.
Impact
Most theses never generate impact beyond a library shelf — not for lack of potential, but because they're rarely mentored toward it. Even where external impact (publication, real-world use) isn't realistic, reframing impact as personal insight or methodological growth still makes the pursuit worthwhile.
Keeping with formalities
Font sizes, margins, and citation formats can feel petty next to the weight of the research itself — but rigid formatting rules are actually a relief: one less open-ended decision in a project already overflowing with them.
Navigating support
Students often find university support services for their thesis — writing labs, library help, supervisor sessions — scattered and hard to discover. Rather than making students hunt down help piecemeal, universities should map, consolidate, and proactively publish these offers as part of onboarding.
Reaching supervisors
Students struggle to get and keep in touch with supervisors, since supervisors vary widely in how they interpret their role and how much time they can offer. The fix isn't more availability, but explicit expectations: supervisors should publish what they're willing to invest and how they like to work, and students should scout for fit before committing.
Seeking peers
The isolating, individually-evaluated nature of thesis work erodes well-being and invites unhealthy comparison with peers. Building a broad network of support — inside and outside academia — protects motivation and keeps the project in perspective.
Support structure
A thesis is a marathon, not a sprint, and many students underestimate how exhausting the isolated, largely self-directed work becomes. Sustaining energy requires a deliberate network of social and recreational supports, not just discipline — relaxation itself is a research strategy.
Support when stuck
Getting stuck briefly is normal; staying stuck is costly, and shame or fear of hurting one's grade often keeps students from asking for help. Mapping out where a project is likely to get difficult in advance, and discussing that risk with a supervisor early, makes it easier to ask before the delay compounds.
Eleven challenges supervisors face
Countless projects
Universities scale lecture halls easily but not one-on-one thesis mentoring, and growing enrolment is straining supervisors' capacity for individual guidance. Digitizing and pooling mentoring insight across supervisors — again, the premise behind Research Stride — is the lever that can make personal mentoring scale.
Inefficient meetings
Meetings between students and supervisors often waste both people's time because students arrive without a clear question, and supervisors don't set expectations for what a productive meeting requires. Requiring answers to three questions before scheduling — what's the issue, what have you tried, how can I help — fixes most of it.
Lack of structure
Students whose plans shift unpredictably are exhausting to mentor, whether the changes are voluntary or the result of poor upfront planning. Agreeing on a tolerable level of change — and a risk profile — at the outset heads off most of the confusion.
More action
Some students over-plan and under-act, endlessly discussing strategy instead of starting, since early progress is inherently hard to foresee. Time-boxing the planning phase and revising strategy incrementally alongside real progress breaks the stall.
Preparedness
Underprepared students unintentionally signal that a meeting is not a valued use of a busy supervisor's time. Treating each touchpoint as an opportunity for progress, not just conversation, earns more attention and investment from mentors.
Questions without ideas
Students who bring supervisors a problem with no ideas of their own signal a lack of ownership, not a lack of ability. Encouraging students to develop and evaluate their own options first — even imperfect ones — trains the core research skill of pushing into a challenge instead of delegating it.
Repeating for everyone
Mentoring means repeating the same foundational advice to every new student. Capturing and sharing this recurring guidance — the seed idea behind the Research Stride digital companion project — frees supervisors' attention for the genuinely non-standard cases that deserve it.
Scalable mentoring
Growing numbers of students are outpacing supervisors' time-poor schedules, and one-on-one guidance doesn't scale the way lectures do. Partial digitization — a shared mentoring knowledge base, self-service guidance, transparent project tracking — is the only realistic way to preserve mentoring quality at scale.
Scarce resources
Research mentoring rarely ranks among university priorities, so it stays chronically under-resourced. Two levers help: scaling the repeatable parts of mentoring through digitization, and making the case to university leadership that showcasing strong student research is itself a valuable outcome.
Tangled projects
Projects that unfold in genuinely unpredictable ways are hard for supervisors to track and evaluate fairly. Setting ground rules for transparency and regular updates up front keeps a project's twists legible without demanding a rigid plan.
Varying performance
Supervisors are skeptical about how much student performance varies, especially under pressure. Much of that variance comes from ill-fitting project scope rather than lack of talent — pairing students with appropriately manageable projects, then holding them to high standards, tends to unstick even struggling researchers.
Research Stride
Several of these findings fed directly into Research Stride, a digital thesis-mentoring companion currently in its conceptual and prototyping phase.
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