Beyond the Threshold: Finding My Own Academic Voice

 

Beyond the Threshold: Finding My Own Academic Voice 

    There are countless ways to explain an idea. During undergraduate studies, feedback often pushes us to explore these different rhythms and intensities of explanation. It can be overwhelming—and at times, deeply frustrating—to wonder whether our approach fits the established academic norms. Being forced out of our comfort zone feels uncomfortable, even discouraging. Yet paradoxically, it’s in those very moments that we learn the most: we discover that the same concept can be expressed from many different angles, each revealing something new.

The perspective widens even further at the postgraduate stage, especially when we have the chance to provide feedback on undergraduate work ourselves. It’s then that I truly appreciated the richness of academic expression. Sometimes, a few exceptional pieces cross your desk—essays so precise, so creative, and so effective that they leave you in awe. You realize, perhaps for the first time, that ideas can be conveyed more powerfully and beautifully than you ever imagined, raising the bar of what you thought was possible.

But the real transformation happens gradually. In postgraduate life, there’s more freedom to develop your own voice. Once you’ve mastered the foundational, canonical ways of presenting ideas, you earn the space to move beyond them. Explanation becomes less about conforming to a template and more about finding the words and structures that feel truest and most effective to you. It’s about expressing complex thoughts in a way that remains rigorous but is also authentically yours.

This process only works if the academic environment nurtures it—if students are given constructive feedback that builds skills rather than just measuring them. When that happens, it becomes our responsibility to take those tools and use them creatively, moving from external, formulaic explanations to explanations that come from within. It’s a shift from speaking in borrowed voices to speaking in our own.

And that’s when it all makes sense: the frustration, the challenges, the breakthroughs. Each step pushes us past another threshold—until we finally realize that what once felt like limitation was actually the start of genuine freedom to think, write, and explain as ourselves.

Toni Font, Aberdeen 29/06/2025