Does Your Institution Have Star Projects?

The advisor is not a supervisor — they are the institutional memory that connects one cohort's dead ends to the next cohort's starting point.

Students cycle through in twelve-month bursts, but the advisor stays. In a star project, the advisor's role shifts from overseeing a single group's work to carrying the full context across years — why approach X was tried and abandoned, what data year two collected, what year three should consider. Advisor retention becomes a strategic priority because losing the advisor means losing the accumulated knowledge that makes the project a star project at all.

The test for whether a topic is a star project: will the fifth cohort still have meaningful, original work to do?

Not every topic sustains multi-year investigation. 'Build a school website' finishes in one cycle. Local environmental monitoring, community health mapping, or cultural heritage preservation reward continued investigation indefinitely. The litmus test forces institutions to choose directions with unlimited depth — problems where every year of data, every new cohort's perspective, and every iteration of the methodology produces genuinely new work.