Actors, agents and authors: A new generation of South African scientists

Something happened to me this year that I did not expect at this stage of my career.

In 2026, we were recruiting PhD candidates for a large project on the sustainable employability of Life Orientation teachers in South Africa — teachers who carry an enormous share of the country’s social burden and who are, in many cases, quietly running out of road. That is how Geraldine van Heerden and Maryke Marais walked into my research journey.

Both of them completed their Master’s degrees in Industrial Psychology at the North-West University. Both are already established, registered psychologists, doing real work with real people. Neither of them needed a doctorate to be credible in her field. They did not arrive with anything to prove.

What struck me first was how eager they are to learn — and then how quickly they do something about it. Not eager in the way people say in an interview. Eager in the way that shows up three weeks later in an email at half past nine at night.

The McAdams frame

In The Art and Science of Personality Development, Dan McAdams describes three layers of the self. We begin as actors — performing roles, managing how we come across. We become agents — setting goals, pursuing projects that matter to us. And some of us become authors — constructing a narrative that gives our lives coherence and purpose across time.

Most doctoral candidates arrive as capable actors. Some arrive as agents. What I have found in this generation, and specifically in these two, is authorship.

Three things stand out.

They are eager to learn, and they do something about it. The eagerness is not a posture adopted for the supervisor’s benefit. It converts into action, usually faster than I anticipate.

They want to make a difference in South Africa and beyond. They are not primarily calculating what they will extract from the arrangement. That orientation is not naivety — both of them are professionally experienced enough to know exactly what a PhD costs. It is a choice.

They accept responsibility that was never assigned to them. Setting up a big project is not glamorous work. It is logistics, ethics applications, spreadsheets, phone calls that go nowhere — the unglamorous scaffolding where character becomes visible. Geraldine and Maryke pitched up to help in places I never expected them to.

I had an appointment with a senior professor in Pretoria and forgot to send Maryke the details — the venue, the time, everything. She found out on her own, and she was there. Geraldine, for her part, does not simply try her best at the task in front of her; she brings a depth of commitment and a respect for us as her promoters that you cannot teach or fake.

What this does to a supervisor

I did not write this to praise two students, although they deserve it. I wrote it because of what their presence has done to my own practice.

When you get older, you can quietly begin to trail behind because complex change demands new learning and new ways of looking at the world, and that is tiring. Working with Geraldine and Maryke has made me want to keep up. I try harder now. I look for opportunities to put in front of them. I engage more fully in their learning journey instead of managing it from a distance. And I learn from them — about how their generation reads the world, about tools I would otherwise have avoided, about the questions worth asking next.

That is the real argument of this post. We talk about developing young scientists as though the transfer runs one way. It does not. A generation that arrives as authors of their own lives will re-author the people who supervise them, if those people are willing.

On the state of South African science

There is a familiar pessimism about the pipeline in this country. I understand where it comes from, and I am not going to pretend the structural problems away.

But the quality of the young psychologists and researchers I am encountering is not the problem. Geraldine and Maryke are not exceptions I stumbled across. They are evidence of what our postgraduate programmes are still capable of producing. The question worth asking is not whether we have the talent. It is whether we are building institutions, funding structures and supervision cultures worthy of it.

I am more optimistic than I was a year ago. That optimism has two names.