OSRE 2024 Mentor Info Session

January 11, 2024 10-11am Pacific Time

Video of Previous Info Session now available

Could your open source project or reproducibility-related research project benefit from working with enthusiastic and talented students who are paid to productively contribute to your work this coming Summer? Would you or someone in your open source or research project be able to mentor a new contributor for no more than 5 hours per week? The Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) Program may be the opportunity you are looking for to move your research forward and build your community.

The OSRE organizers will give a brief overview of the Summer 2024 program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor at a Mentor Info Session on January 11 at 10am Pacific Time.

The OSRE is modeled after the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which matches undergraduate student contributors with mentors working on open source projects. The goal of the OSRE program is to seed contributor communities of UC-based open source research efforts through participation in parallel efforts like GSoC AND to help make computational research efforts reproducible with our NSF funded Summer of Reproducibility. The OSRE leverages our involvement in global programs like GSoC to recruit students from around the world. All students are paid a stipend and mentors are provided administrative and other needed support to allow for a productive summer.

The OSRE 2023 supported the work of 38 successful summer projects and we are looking to expand that number even further this year. But we need mentors to work with our amazing students. Mentors from previous years have spoken highly of their experience:

The OSRE funded student โ€ฆ helped us create detailed docs and scripts to easily reproduce our project evaluations. This not only eases our own future work, but also helps us promote our work as other people can easily reproduce our results.

[The program] provided us a great platform to connect with great students and have them join our projects and make progress.

[The OSRE] can be very useful for the sustainability of academic open source projects. It can help identify potential contributors and kick-start the design and implementation of new features.

At this meeting, we will give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor. We will be asking a number of our mentors from the OSRE 2023 program to join in the discussion to share their experiences. We will also highlight the changes in the 2024 program aimed at making the OSRE even more rewarding for both mentors and students.

Stephanie Lieggi
Stephanie Lieggi
Executive Director of OSPO, Executive Director of CROSS, UC Santa Cruz