Structuring Graduate Student Work

Pattern Summary

Save time and create clarity with student workers by breaking their projects down into small, clearly scoped tasks and reviewing progress regularly.

Problem / Challenge

• OSPO staff are often responsible for supervising graduate student workers alongside a wide range of other operational and strategic responsibilities.
• Where an OSPO is only supervising one or a small number of students at a time, it may not have the established supervision processes that a larger research lab or department would typically have in place.
• Project drift or a failure to progress may not surface until much of the funded work period has already passed, by which point there is little time left to correct course.

Context

• A university with an established or emerging OSPO.
• The OSPO is directly supervising the work of one or more graduate students.
• OSPO staff have limited time available for day-to-day supervision of student work, alongside their other responsibilities.

Forces

OSPO staff have limited time to closely supervise students, due to competing operational and strategic responsibilities.

Solution

• Break student work down into smaller, clearly defined tasks rather than broad or open-ended project goals, so that progress is easier to track with limited supervision time.
• Take a more structured, "waterfall" style approach to project design than might otherwise be used, specifying deliverables and milestones.
• Be specific about what the task is and what the deliverables are so that both the student and the supervisor have a shared, concrete understanding of what "done" looks like at each stage.
• Schedule regular check-ins against these milestones.

Resulting Context

Breaking work into smaller, clearly defined tasks with regular milestone check-ins allows OSPO staff to supervise graduate students effectively when their own time for oversight is limited.

Additional Learning from Johns Hopkins University Open Source Program Office

We've found that projects need to be much more detailed and much more "waterfall" than we might otherwise design them. It helps to be very specific about what the task is and what the deliverables are.

Known Instances

• Johns Hopkins University Open Source Programs Office

References

Related Patterns

• Onboarding Graduate Leads for Open Source Internship Programs
• Open Research Community Accelerator
• Open Source Capstone Course

Contributors & Acknowledgement

• Angela Newell — University of Texas at Austin
• Ciara Flanagan — CURIOSS, 0009-0005-3153-7673
• Clara Morella Teixidor — Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)
• Collin Capano — Syracuse University, 0000-0002-0355-5998
• Daniel Shown — Saint Louis University, 0009-0002-5716-8835
• David Lippert — George Washington University, 0009-0003-6444-9595
• Kendall Fortney — University of Vermont, 0009-0006-3898-0771
• Jeffrey Young — OSPO@GT, 0000-0001-9841-4057
• Megan Forbes — Johns Hopkins University, 0000-0002-2611-1441

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