Bring Your Own Research Project

If you are already working in research, or about to, this pathway lets you look at that work from angles it is not usually examined from.

Research projects are scoped tightly, and for good reason. But the questions just outside that scope often decide whether the work lands. Who will use this, and who is left out? What does it assume about the communities it touches? What happens to it once it leaves the lab? This project gives you the time and a structure to take one of those questions seriously: the social, cultural, ethical, economic or technical side your main project has had to set aside.

It works in either direction. As an on-ramp, it does the groundwork research often skips: the literature beyond your discipline, the ethics application, the first conversations with the people affected. As an off-ramp, it carries maturing work somewhere new, such as a policy brief, a community-facing version or a plan for putting the findings into use.

What this could look like

• A PhB (Science) student in a freshwater ecology lab might map who relies on the catchment they sample, and draft the consultation plan their Honours year will need.
• A PhB (HASS) student researching language revitalisation might review the policy literature on funding community language programs, and write a brief the research group can send to government.
• An Engineering R&D student working on microgrid control might write an impact assessment of who gains and who carries the risk when a remote community switches supply.

The test: your supervisor would see the work as strengthening the research, not distracting from it.

You will practise something research training rarely makes room for: standing outside your own project and asking how it looks to people who don't share your discipline. That means borrowing methods you weren't trained in, testing your findings against community, cultural or policy realities, and explaining to an expert audience why that matters. Researchers who can do this are the ones whose work gets used.

Talk to your supervisor first. You are not asking them to take on a second project. You are asking whether a defined extension fits the research goals you have already agreed, and what limits it must respect: data, intellectual property, confidentiality, publication. Send them the guide for research supervisors.

Check ethics early. If ethics is your output, you draft the application with your supervisor, who has to create it in ANU's system. If your work involves people, such as a consultation or interviews, approval must be in place before you start. Allow weeks, not days.

Useful starting points: ANU Human Ethics guidance, the Academic Skills guides to literature reviews and research proposals, and the KNoTs Reflexivity as a Learning Tool, Unravelling Complexity and Insights from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing.

A project outline in your Course Pathway Plan, agreed with your supervisor, covering: the research it extends; the gap your work fills; your method; what you will hand over; and how you and your supervisor will check in.

Then the output itself, which must be something the research can use. Depending on where the research is, this could be:

Before or early in the research

• a literature review from a field outside your own
• an ethics application, or a variation to an existing one, drafted for submission
• a stakeholder map: who the research affects, who should be consulted, who holds relevant knowledge
• a community consultation plan, or the consultation itself with a summary of what you heard
• a scoping note on the cultural, legal or regulatory constraints the research will meet

Later in the research

• a policy brief or submission based on the findings
• a plain-language or community-facing version of the work
• a plan for putting the findings into use, naming who would need to act
• an impact or risk assessment covering effects the main project did not examine

Whatever you produce becomes your Shareable Artefact, and it should hold up on its own when your research group reads it. Plan for at least one round of feedback from your supervisor before you finalise it.

Recommended to students who:

• Are in the Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) – Science, the Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) – Humanities and Social Sciences or the Bachelor of Engineering (Research and Development) (Honours)
• Are in a later year of any degree and already working in a lab or research group
• Have a supervisor in some capacity (current, future Honours, or an established research relationship) willing to mentor them
• Want a project that builds on their research rather than competing with it

Two cautions. Hours count once: choose work the research needs but would not otherwise get done. Writing the chapter you were always going to write is not a SoCIETIE project; writing the literature review your discipline never asked you for is. And data, IP and confidentiality are governed by the research project's agreements, so check before anything leaves the group.