Ayca Uygur Wessel

Dear IBP’ers,

I’ve been taking a trip down memory lane, since the day I got invited to write on this column. The whole process took me straight back to the year 2017, which is when I first began teaching at IBP. I was younger, and being somewhat of an outsider to the Danish educational system, completely clueless about what it meant to teach on IBP. I remember being surprised that people from outside of academia knew about the program and thought that teaching on it was a big deal. Well, I’m quite glad that I had no idea that the program was so well-known. If I had known, at the time, that I had just been entrusted with teaching some of the most talented and curious minds of the region, I would have completely freaked out. Instead, and to my luck, my relationship with IBP got to be a smooth yet positively challenging learning journey, one in which I discovered a true passion for teaching. Believe me; a career gift does not get better than that! And now, thanks to the editors, I get to look back on those wonderful five years, and tell you in a nutshell some things about my experience with IBP that might hopefully speak to you.

Interacting with numerous students on IBP over the years has taught me that educational success is not about grades. It is more about staying curious and trying out things with the intention of finding your own path, on your own time. Many of you come here having secured the best of grades in your educational journey, and in that sense, you are a teacher’s dream. But now, it’s time to slightly let go of that target to make room for other ones that will help you flourish in your future lives. Targets such as trying out possible career paths, looking deeper into certain topics, making time for networking and social interaction, building strong relationships with peers, professors and other stakeholders who will contribute to your long-term growth…

We all know that grades are only a measure taken at a particular point in time. And whereas they may be the best estimate we came up with, they are not a perfect measure of how successful you are, or how good you are in a certain field. To be honest, I wish we had a system of giving you feedback without having to mark your work. Teaching and learning would have been so much more effective and stressfree that way! Well then, here is my advice to you under this imperfect system of grading and marking: Do not let grades define your self-worth as a learner or distract you from other important things you want to accomplish through your education.

Furthermore, do not let grades come between you and professors whose courses you find challenging. Speaking for myself, whether you show up at my office wanting to secure a top grade, or you’re going through tough times and need to make sure you pass the course, I will treat and guide you equally.

To me, IBP is not a place where you have to prove yourself or your worth, but one where you can find your strength and your passion. Some people think of this program as a series of boxes that you tick as you go along, but in my opinion, this is quite far from the IBP logic. This program is more about questions rather than answers, and more about discovery rather than performance. This is the program where you do not necessarily have to be good at every single thing, but one where you explore paths and come one step closer to picking your own lane. What this might mean for you is that you should never be afraid of putting more weight on topics and activities that interest you, and less on things that you intend to make use of more generically. In the end, you taking charge of your own path to learn deeply about what matters to your journey will be way more important than what question is more likely to come up in an exam. The bottom line to learning is that you learn for yourself, and never with the intention of pleasing anyone else.

So far, we talked mostly about the learning side of things. But there are also things on the teaching side that IBP has had me reflect on that I’d like to touch upon before I conclude. Before teaching on IBP, I tended to think of being an educator as a job where one has to convey certain topics in a ‘neat way’. But as the years passed by, I got to experience a different side of teaching, one that is more about mentorship. I’m not claiming at all that I’m good at doing this, but only trying to say that this is definitely my number one goal in my relationship to you, my students. I literally live for those magic moments when I manage to get someone feel more curious about a topic they had not encountered before, or when I can convince someone that they can in fact achieve what they set out to achieve in the first place (this last one happens on Qualitative Methods a lot!). These are the things that give so much meaning to what I do.

For all of those, I have you to thank. So thanks to all of you IBP’ers, for making my IBP journey such a lovely experience. Please keep on making all of us better with your constructive feedback, and keep on working hard to make this world into a better place with the tools you get here! If you want to have a chat, my door is always open.

Wishing you all the best, Ayca