A project organiser's experience
Interview with Oskar Gauffin, biostatistician at Uppsala Monitoring Centre, who supervised a degree project in spring 2024.
What is your and your employer's experience of having a degree project carried out by a mathematics student from Uppsala University?
"We are very pleased to have a competent and driven student who, with our supervision, could run a development project."
Has the contact with the university's researchers/subject reviewers in connection with the degree project been rewarding?
"We are satisfied with the contact we had, the subject reviewer participated in meetings via video link every two weeks. Having this contact makes it convenient to discuss questions and ensure that the project is of a sufficiently high standard."
What is your experience with the supervisor role?
"My experience is that it is valuable to continuously talk about what kind of support the student needs during the project. It can be about suggesting frameworks, or giving more space to try out own ideas from the student, or giving feedback on how to present their project in writing. Being a supervisor was rewarding in that I had to motivate and explain things that I usually take for granted. It was rewarding to see how the project developed from start to finish. My estimate is that I put in somewhere between two and three weeks of work."
What was the project about?
"The work was about method development in identifying potential adverse drug reactions, so-called signals. At the detailed level, the project was about the construction of credibility intervals for a disproportionality estimator and whether an assumption you make there should be considered reasonable."
What would you like to say to those who are considering giving a thesis project to our students?
"If you have the opportunity and a suitable project, supervising a thesis project can be both an enjoyable and stimulating experience."
Link to an interview with the student that was supervised by Oskar.
Link to project report in the university's publication database DiVA.