During my long career in teaching and assisting students to write research proposals and doing research, I found my passion in working with and graduating postgraduate students. During this time, I mentored and supervised more than 100 masters and doctoral students.
Over the years, I noticed that many students found academic writing daunting and very challenging, and academic institutions rarely provide any academic writing assistance or guidance. This led me to start academic writing workshops for students.
Through these academic writing workshops, I found that I was taking on more and more students on a part-time basis mentoring. Today I mentor and help students to complete their degrees in several fields of study and faculties, including the Natural Sciences, Agriculture, Heath Sciences, Humanities, Engineering and Art.
Over the years, I have authored or co-authored many academic articles and developed, written and published learning material for several fields of study. For example, I wrote more than 40 textbooks in mathematics and ancillary health for Adult Based Education (ABET) in South Africa.
I have extensive training and experience in academic writing, reading and study methods providing me with skills that very few academics can boast of.
I spent more than 45 years in different academic institutions in South Africa doing research and teaching. I started my academic career at the University of Pretoria, where I obtained my Doctorate in Science in Genetics. At the University of Pretoria, I started as a junior lecturer and later progressed to a full professor.
After 25 years in Pretoria, I joined the Department of Genetics at the University of Natal, today known as the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.
At UKZN, I became heavily involved with tree genetics and collaborated with several researchers at the Institute of Commercial Forestry Research. Through my involvement with forestry research, I took on a position as a principal researcher at the CSIR.
After several years of research at the CSIR, I accepted the position of research professor in the Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences at the Central University of Technology (CUT), Free State, South Africa.
After my retirement from formal academia in 2019, I received many requests from students asking for help completing their thesis or dissertation, particularly with the academic writing part of their projects.
In the beginning, most of my contracts and consultations were with the university that I had retired from, assisting the students in a few departments to complete their postgraduate studies. However, quickly I became overwhelmed by the number of students looking for mentoring and guidance concerning academic writing, research and publications.
In time, this led to the creation of Graduate Mastery. Together with my long-time technology partners, that are experts in web technology, cloud platforms and Internet data security and privacy, we designed the Graduate Mastery Platform. We combined my vast experience in navigating the world of academic research and publication with technology to create a highly flexible and complete system, addressing all the needs of an academic looking to complete any publication.
