My day ended today with a great conversation about the ownership of research projects with a postdoc. When you make the transition from graduate student to postdoc, whose projects are whose? Are they the projects of your supervisors, or are they the projects of you? And should you keep doing them, or should you move to new things? I don't think there are easy answers, and I think that there are many subtle ways in which people have unresolved differences about these things. Since much of my work these days is postdoctoral mentoring, I've thought about this a lot. My only recommendation, which is hard to implement, is that clear communication about expectations is really, really important. And not just the expectations of the supervisors; the expectations of the (former) student are way more important!
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