I would also like to be transparent in stating that I have much higher demands and expectations towards graduate students. If you’re considering me as a graduate advisor, please be ready to commit your time to pursuing a rigorous and highly involved journey as a researcher. For example, if you are intending to pursue a graduate degree on the side and you’re already overloaded with commitments and responsibilities elsewhere, I am unlikely to be the right supervisor for you.

I believe that graduate school is a process and journey of overcoming trials in order to hone your expertise and skills as a researcher. For you to earn the right to hold a Masters or a PhD, I believe that you need to become exceptional in your skills and pedigree as a researcher, and this applies both in terms of quantity of work and quality of work. Some prospective graduate students may think that doing a graduate degree just involves clearing required modules and doing a single dissertation. If you choose to be supervised by me, however, I will expect you to take on multiple research projects and pursuits in addition to your main dissertation. I will expect you to pick up many statistical skills, including structural equation modelling and multilevel modelling, and to become very proficient in working with quantitative data. Be prepared that you will need to spend hours upon hours cleaning and analysing data as well as doing detailed literature reviews. I will also expect you to actively pursue publications (many of which I will expect you to take on first-author roles) in reputable peer-reviewed journals in all projects that you work on with me, as well as to pursue presentations in local as well as international conferences (I’m more than happy to nominate you to receive funding for these conferences too for presentations that excel and exceed expectations!). All these are tremendously time-consuming, challenging, and can get extremely intense (I really must emphasise how difficult and overwhelming the process of publishing a paper can get, especially in a reputable journal). While words on a page won’t sufficiently capture just how intense all of these can get, I hope to nevertheless transparently set all these expectations upfront so you know what you’re getting into.

Note also that I do not supervise qualitative projects and will only consider quantitative projects (or minimally mixed-methods projects that are predominantly quantitative).

At the Masters level, I would generally only consider students who are keen to work on a topic that is directly related to something I am already working on.

At the PhD level, your proposed topic need not be a direct continuation of my existing projects but must nevertheless be closely related to my areas of expertise in emotions and well-being.