“We want Principal investigators to be able to move,” says career coach Jennifer Polk, “But the impacts of that move on PhD students can range from none at all to them not finishing their degrees, depending on what happens next.”
Open communication and flexibility can help to make any principal investigator’s departure a smooth one.“I don’t want to be here, and I can’t get out,” says a geosciences student who started her PhD programme in 2015 and has no clear end in sight. “I want to find a postdoc and get the mentorship experience I’m not getting currently, but I can’t finish my dissertation.”
For a year and a half, Pestana served as an unofficial mentor for the other students in de Souza’s lab, until she died in September 2020. Then he asked his university and members of his postgraduate programme if he could become the official mentor of students in the group. “It was very, very hard for me because if I acknowledged my pain, I would break down and couldn’t do the job I needed to do to honour her legacy,” he says. “But I wanted to do it. It was not a burden.
Owing to stress and uncertainty, she says, “I couldn’t do any productive, substantial work during that month.” Then in January 2021, another professor at her institute called to check in and inquire about her research progress. “That was a good moment for me. I got this feeling that somebody is here who knows that I exist,” she says.
Polk encourages junior researchers to be assertive about their professional needs — but acknowledges that it shouldn’t be their responsibility to do so. “They can’t unilaterally make an adviser comply with their wishes, but they can certainly send reminder e-mails,” she says, adding that feeling insecure about a publication record shouldn’t deter people from applying for jobs. “Hiring is never just about candidate A having more publications than candidate B.
Open discussions with her adviser about what the move to New York would entail and why it was a good opportunity in terms of his research programme helped Gurel to understand why Alushin made the decision to leave and informed her plans moving forwards. Ultimately, Gurel and Alushin worked out a hybrid arrangement in which she could split her time between the NIH and Rockefeller.
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