Skip to content

Overcome Barriers to Recruiting Graduate Students §

Pattern Summary §

Overcome financial barriers to access graduate skills and talent.

Problem / Challenge §

  • Graduate students are often tied to tuition remission, tuition waivers or a "buy-out" of their time from a supervising faculty member - making them more expensive to hire than undergraduate students.
  • Where formal Research Assistant (RA) or Graduate Assistant (GA) positions exist, they can be prohibitively expensive for an OSPO, sometimes consuming an entire budget on one role.
  • Some OSPO funders explicitly exclude tuition costs from their funding requirements.
  • Tuition rates and rules vary considerably even within a single university depending on a student's subject area, their international status and/or their status as a masters or PhD student. This causes difficulties for OSPOs to budget or plan with confidence.
  • Union contracts covering graduate student labour may add a further layer of rules that OSPOs must navigate.

Context §

  • A research or teaching university with an established or emerging OSPO.
  • The OSPO requires skilled graduate students to undertake strategic or operational work.
  • There may be opportunities to match graduate students with open source projects on campus.

Forces §

  • There is an interest among this cohort in gaining real-world experience and in expanding their skills in open source software.
  • OSPOs do not have the budget to recruit graduate students at RA or GA grades of pay.
  • The OSPO is not seeking research roles to advance its work or program.
  • OSPO staff are not HR/recruitment experts.

Solution §

Throughout institutions, graduate students may be hired as part-time or hourly employees on work that is explicitly separate from their research or theses. This keeps the arrangement outside of tuition remission and waiver processes and allows OSPOs to employ graduate students in the same way as any other part-time staff member.

The solution below outlines some core activities to consider:

Design and Communication of Roles §

  • Design and scope graduate student level roles as 'student worker' or paid positions that are separate and distinct from academic requirements.
  • Advertisements and job descriptions should clearly inform students about how the role relates (or doesn't relate) to their studies.

Use existing Hiring Structures and Expertise §

  • Most universities already have a system for hiring students on an hourly or part-time basis for roles (e.g. for work in canteens, campus stores etc.). The same hiring and employment infrastructure can be used for recruiting and employing OSPO student workers.
  • Reduce time and uncertainty involved by linking in with colleagues with experience in student and graduate hiring. These colleagues may be based in central services (e.g. the careers office, a central HR function), or within the Departments/units where the OSPO is based.

Resulting Context §

OSPOs can access graduate skills and talent within existing budgets.

Many graduate students are keen to gain real-world experience alongside their studies. A role of this kind can be a genuine, mutually beneficial opportunity for both the student and the OSPO - once sufficient clarity is offered from the outset.

Known Instances §

References §

Contributors & Acknowledgement §

A note on AI use: This content was drafted with the help of AI. As a small organization, AI tools help us turn rich conversations into written resources with less effort - meaning we can offer more to the community. As always, there were plenty of human eyes reviewing, editing and improving the content before it was published. Thanks go to our community for the insights. If you do spot any errors, please let us know so we can correct them!