Transcript: Susan’s experience with Grad Coach
My name is Susan. Before I joined Grad Coach, some of my main challenges were the structure. I literally had no idea where to start. Having these challenges made me just feel really useless — really sick, actually. When so far I’ve always been a really solid student and always had really good grades, it just left me feeling quite incapable and quite low, really.
I decided to join Grad Coach because I realised that they were actually a professional organisation that was there to help students. There were some other organisations that I looked into, and one that phoned me up a lot. And they were offering to write my dissertation for me. They had all sorts of false promises and it just wasn’t real. Grad Coach was quite clearly an organisation with integrity that was going to support me to do my own work.
Working with Grad Coach helped me with the structure and the organisation of my work. It helped me with doing the statistical testing, which had not been explained by my university. It then helped me to gain confidence. My Grad Coach tutor gave me really excellent feedback. So I was confident that I could send him a draft of what I had done, and he would honestly, but very nicely, point out where I needed to make some improvements, or what things I needed to consider. So he was scaffolding me in what I needed to do.
It’s hard to pick one favourite thing about working with Grad Coach because there’s actually so much. The first thing I would say is my tutor, and that relationship was really important, because he’s clearly an incredibly smart guy, but he was also very down to earth, which made it easy to connect with him. I felt that we had an instant connection. So that relationship was really important moving forward. And the other thing that’s really important was there are so many resources on Grad Coach. So it meant that I didn’t have to spend any extra money on tutor time, for instance, because my tutor could say, well, there’s a link to how to structure the introduction, or how to structure the whole thesis, so that everything would fall into place. The resources are outstanding. They’re just resources for every single thing that you need to do. And they’re constantly updating and creating new things. So I think that’s another great thing about Grad Coach — they don’t stand still. They’re always looking at how to improve and how to tweak what they’ve already got, which is a really high standard. The whole experience was better than I could have ever hoped for.
I might have benefited if I’d signed up to Grad Coach a bit earlier, because although I did give myself plenty of time to write my dissertation, a dissertation takes about three times as long to write as you actually think it does. But having said that, I had a really good grade and I came out with a first. So I was very pleased with that.
For anyone thinking about joining Grad Coach, I would say that it has helped me enormously in terms of my academic progress. One of the things I had been worried about was, would it be value? And it’s been such good value for money — in fact, I could not believe how much value I got out of it. Not just in terms of my own personal development, but in terms of the cost, because it was quite a big cost for me. But actually, it was so worth it. It really, really was very good value for money. It was a completely amazing experience working with Grad Coach. I didn’t know what to expect. I just knew that I was really stuck and that I really needed some help. And I got that.