First, In a professional setting, people work for a salary. In a student organization, they work for experience. When "Finals Week" hits, engagement drops to zero, and even without it, college takes a huge part of these people's lives.

Therefore, you find yourself, as a manager who's also a student, under the obligation of moving away from rigid deadlines and toward "Asynchronous Accountability." Instead of demanding 10 hours a week, I let them choose their deadlines and feel the responsibility to accomplish them. If a dev could only give 2 hours a week because of a math exam, those 2 hours had to result in a useful task.

Furthermore, A 9:00 AM Daily Standup doesn't work when half the team is in a Fluid Mechanics lecture, and that's why dynamically setting up frequencies of meetings and stay aware of any possible unavailability, from an exceptional exam to one of the team, to a climatic constraint allowing the team to work from home.

Finally, Let’s be honest: in a student team, the skill levels vary wildly. I often started with code that ignored types, had hundreds of lines in a single line and almost impossible to maintain, this is the case for most of us and maybe even most graduate without getting past that step, in this case you have to put into consideration all of this and focus on developing the skills of these colleagues, that's why you'll need much more guides and even more presence and cleaning also much less strict.

To conclude, Leadership is not an option in this case, it is a need to perform and that's what I learned while managing students, just like me, it taught me that leadership isn't about giving orders; it's about removing friction. By building systems that respected my team’s schedules and provided clear guardrails for their code, we delivered platforms that did and still is serving thousands of users.

Being a student lead didn't slow us down, it forced us to be more efficient than many professional teams I've seen.