Via Bitesize Bio, an interesting perspective on Postdoc life vs PI life. Of course, it’s possibly a little premature to be thinking about such issues when I’ve just finished my first year in graduate school, but the first paragraph in particular caught my eye:

The postdoc (and grad student, for that matter) perspective is — and I recognize it both from my own experience and my colleagues — that you come up with most of the ideas, do all the work, and the PI just takes the credit. It is a bit exaggerated, but the point is that the vast majority of the time spend on a project is time spent by a postdoc or grad student. The advisor reads the occasional draft paper, comment on the research a bit here and there, but doesn’t really put in the hours.

A few weeks ago, I chose my thesis lab and jumped right back into benchwork, picking up my rotation project from where I left off at the end of last November. My P.I. conceived the project, tailoring it to my specific interests (there’s a reason why no other roton worked on the same project), and most of the ideas have emerged as a collaboration. In any case, I don’t feel as if my P.I. “just takes the credit”: though I obviously do all the actual experimental work, she provides me with input at every level starting from suggestions about adjusting protocols to the larger picture of what this project aims to contribute to the field. She’s very careful to acknowledge my intellectual input when talking about the project to third parties, and I feel that I have sufficient independence to take the project in directions that interest me. So far, I’ve felt that I’m receiving the right level of guidance while also being encouraged to take initiative and explore ideas on my own.

I wonder if my satisfaction with her mentorship style will decline over the years. Disillusionment with graduate school (cf. Grad School Malaise) seems to be inevitable; what makes the difference is whether you regard it as a temporary phase induced by stress and sense of failure or whether you feel that you made the wrong decision to pursue a career in research. That being said, I do benefit from the fact that my P.I. is a fairly new faculty member, whose lab is small enough that she has enough time to spend guiding each student. I also think that compatibility of personalities helps.

My other two rotations had P.I.s with extremely different mentorship styles: the hands-off P.I. who only touched base with his students’ projects if they had an urgent question or during their lab meeting and the bullying but attention-deficit P.I. who goes around arguing with his students over what experiments they should do next (and berating them for not working long enough hours). Ironically, I think both P.I.s can actually be ideal for certain students, depending on what sort of mentorship they’re looking for. Personally, I think I could have managed in both labs but I would not have been as happy; one of the reasons why I chose this particular lab over both was because I thought the P.I. struck the right balance in her mentorship style.