My first Ph.D. student successfully defended her thesis yesterday afternoon, completing the journey during which we took the above photo, years ago.
She did a great job.
I have all sorts of interesting feelings about this process that I’m not quite sure how to put into words, but pride is up there high on the list.
She’ll be back in November, hired by our cardiology colleagues to continue stocking DNA for a prospective research cohort into certain heart defects, and then will spread her wings and fly to a great lab in the U.S. for her postdoc.
I need to take stock, but perhaps the weekend will help with that.
Any other advisors feel a bit of “empty nest” syndrome? And relief?
thank you for this important topic and for your nice way of putting it. A certain ‘empty nest’-effect is approaching for me, too, as two people from my team are leaving. Makes me happy to see how well we got on, learning from each other. My student assistants’ cultural background is different from mine and also different from the dominant culture around here. It is great to see how well our wiki-based Q&A workflow developed across cultural habits and I hope to welcome more students into our project team who are eager to learn about the pleasures of online collaboration. So, over here, no relief yet but a hope to be able to hire again :-)
Hey congratulations! And yes I know those mixed feelings. I don’t have any children but the pacing I did outside the viva of my first PhD student made a number of people make not entirely favourable comparisons with expectant fathers…
Well done both of you. If you were in this country, that would give you an extra line to put on your Canadian Institutes of Health Research CV – the bit about students supervised.
I’ve never been in your position, fingers crossed one day, but congratulations!
Claudia – I tried to set up a lab wiki unsuccessfully, to the extent that I couldn’t convince my current members to actually want to use it. Well done on your part!
Cameron – Thank goodness I got to attend the defense. It must be torture to have to wait outside! Indeed, much like parents of kids going through their A-levels (or whatever they’re called nowadays) or baccalaureates.
Richard, yeah, I’ve got to work on that. Once the article gets out the door.
Jennifer – I’m sure it will happen if you want it to. But there are other kinds of big projects that are equally worthy and which give you that sense of satisfaction on completion.