Project Supervision – An Engineering Approach

For more than twenty years, a group based supervision strategy has been used when supervising engineering bachelor- and master thesis students at our research group. In recent years, we have formalised the approach and used our industry experience to create a very successful framework for project supervision.

This paper is a best practice guide aiming at research groups that would like to try to implement our supervision approach or parts of it. The approach is based on the belief that engineering students should be prepared for their new role as development engineers or PhD students as part of their master thesis writing.

The supervision principles are: Ownership: The student should feel that their project is their own. Ideally, they should formulate the project themselves. Write early: We strongly encourage the students to write and generate figures and images already from the first week of the project period. Management: The student is considered project manager of his own project.

The supervisor is a guide or coach (or a project owner) Plans: The student is asked to write a project plan during the first week of the project together with a risk-analysis. Group Meetings: A group of students and supervisors meet every week on a fixed weekday. In our team, it is normal that one supervisor supervises three to five projects simultaneously.

The core of the supervision is the weekly meetings where the students present what they have been doing and what they plan to do. By default, all students are present at all meetings. Weekly meetings are scheduled to be at a specific day at a specific place for the entire process.