This project focused on a group of students who were being supervised by Connie. Most of these students had been identified as problem students by the institution with these students finding study difficult, many were part time and many had dropped out or were going to. Connie was new and was given the students and wanted to examine their experiences and her own. The research took place between 2009 and 2011 in a school of education.

Six students were involved and initially this was quantitative data only related to results. All students had been delayed in completing and all had started their dissertation in different months of the year. There were 3 males students and 3 female and all were part time.

The researcher asked the students to write a narrative of their experience of the doing the dissertation and data was collected from the journals and text messages etc. The researcher also kept a diary. This enabled sharing of experiences.

There were three key themes in the data which were:

• Academic issues around writing and language, lack of prior experience of undertaking research, undertaking a literature review was also something they were less familiar with
• Personal issues included illness, job demands and finance
• Administration and organisational issues included delays in being allocated supervisors and students confused about requirements

Students found that having one group with one supervisor was good the support was there and they gained intellectually. This is now being looked at for future groups.