bar of soap

My female owner felt that she had the best research supervision session today, ever since she started meeting up with her research supervisor (RS). Three times in all, if my maths don’t fail me.

Happy to say, he scaled down her project even more. She originally had to conduct two studies, one with questionnaires and one with an intervention. Today, he said that she can do without the second study (which is much harder to complete). By playing around with the various data she will be collecting from the first study, he showed her how she could expand her study into three studies. Amazing! Without doing more work! Grinning, he told her that the good way to say it is “manipulating the variables”, and the bad way to say it is.. (are you ready?) “mind masturbation”, where you just keep thinking about how to relate all the variables. Wahaha. My female owner couldn’t stop laughing at his “bad” term.

RS went on to share with my female owner many things about being a postgraduate and working in a university.

Among many of the things, he told her to have more confidence in herself (“you are good, so show it”). That she is already a postgraduate student, so she needs to think and behave like one (e.g. be an independent worker). He also said that she should not be afraid to show her intelligence (which he reckons its because of her being an Asian, and a female and having worked in other settings) or else the university cannot distinguish her “from a bar of soap” (?!).

For the third time, he offered her a job as his research assistant and my female owner finally accepted the offer, with details to be confirmed. And he asked her for her previous assignment (which she submitted to him last semester) so that he could use it for his upcoming teaching trip to Beijing. He also spoke about looking for opportunities to publish her work (not that she has done any!).

My female owner realised that RS is a strategist (he taught her how to present her research proposal to “shut them up”). She’s convinced that she would certainly benefit from his supervision and under his guidance and mentorship, develop her clinical maturity.

Thinking about what he said and what he did during the session, my female owner realised that RS is probably the first person in authority who showed so openly that he believed in her and her abilities, without her having really proven herself (e.g. through his class in the previous semester, her grades (of which he contributed a good one) and her research write-ups) Is that what Carl Rogers meant when he said “unconditional positive regard”?