There used to be a time not that long ago where the pinnacle of any academic's career was the solo authored paper.
Following grad school was usually the best time to pursue solo authorship because it proved your credibility in academia.
In my fields of education or social sciences more broadly, it's been a long time since I've seen and referred to a paper that was written by one person.
In my opinion, this is because most research is done by a team of people -- from conception of the ideas to the research to the writing of the article.
However, I think we can still tell that this legacy is still affecting academia today.
How do I know this?
Because most grad students, myself included at some point, believe they have to do everything on their own.
Many grad students struggle with asking for help for academic challenges, even though grad school is probably where the most amount of challenges are occurring.
This is because there can often be a steep incline of complexity of material in grad school and the context is quite different from undergraduate education.
I recognize that this is certainly not the case for everyone, however, it is a dominant belief that in grad school you must do everything by yourself and asking for help is a weakness.
I bring this up because of my use of self-regulated learning as the main learning theory I use. Sometimes because self-regulated learning has the word "self" in it, students think that must mean do everything by yourself.
In contrast, self-regulated learning is a social-cognitive theory which means that recognizing that learning is a socially constructed process that is heavily reliant on learning in environments with other people is crucial.
When grad students omit the social part of their learning, they are omitting a large part of how we learn.
So, the next time you have that urge to buckle down and do everything on your own, see if there is someone who you could ask for help, ask how you can help them, or anything else that brings learning back into the social sphere.
Being an independent learner is harder than you think.
Trust me, it's worth it.
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