A Sincere Advice to Researchers With the Farmer’s Mentality

In sociology, they distinguish between two classes of goal achievement strategies. They define the hunter’s mentality as those people who determine short term goals and they work hard to achieve them. They also define the farmer’s mentality as those people who create deep and long term goals and they work hard over an extended period of time to achieve these goals. Hunters are brighter, well-known and sometimes powerful. Farmers are more patient, determinant and game-changers in the long term but in the short term, they are low-profile or relatively unknown.

Both the farmer’s and the hunter’s mentalities obviously manifest in the academic world. Some professors publish a huge number of papers as a result of small and selective achievements from their research topics. Other professors publish a few journals in a year. However, every few years, they publish a good and influential book in their field. Hunters know how to handle and write short documents with high professionalism. Farmers know how to write and manage long documents in a very professional manner. Most universities worldwide prefer and promote hunters over farmers because they are seeking a higher number of publications which reflects positively on the universities ranking and reputation.

After this introduction, I would like to direct my advice to the farmer academicians:

I know that you have registered for your Master’s or PhD because you are passionate about your chosen field of study. You have a vision and you can imagine your achievements. On the other hand, your supervisor is careless about your passion and is pushing you to publish voraciously. You are trying your best, but you always feel you cannot publish an unfinished theory, similarly to how you cannot serve uncooked food. If you feel that this is your problem, then follow your heart and work hard, learn a few things that your supervisor or university usually don't teach you, It is the art of managing long documents.

To write a short document, you only need to have the basic daily knowledge of MS Word. To write a long document however, you will need, in addition to the basic skills, another completely different set of skills including section breaks, headings, styles, cross references and captions. Without these skills, any long document will be in complete haywire. So, if you are an academician with farmer’s mentality, and you want to create an astonishing thesis from which later you may want to extract and publish a few powerful journal papers, then the long document techniques are critical for you.

Perhaps you will say that you don’t have the time. Perhaps your supervisor will sincerely (or insincerely) tell you it’s not a suitable time!

“Wait until you finish the experimental work!”.

“Wait until you start writing your thesis!”.

“Wait until you publish your review paper!”.

Remember that most of the professors are hunters. And many universities don’t provide the required resources to learn long document management techniques. Hence, If you think like a farmer, follow your bless. Learn long document techniques, get your thesis done and formatted and then you can bless everyone by publishing your achievements.

To begin with long document management, we are providing you here with important websites, YouTube videos and PDFs to give you a head start.

Resources from MyThesis Hub

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