I’ve recently started to work on a research project. I haven’t had a real research experience before, and I’m going to talk about my first impressions in this post. I hate people who generalize their first impressions and tell them to other people with a lot of confidence. This might misguide people severely. Thus, keep the fact that these are just my first impressions in your mind while reading this post. Also, if you’re an experienced researcher, I’ll be happy to hear (read) your opinion in the comments.
The first thing to note is that I think there’s a high proability for PhD students to have a lack of leadership skill. That may be because most of them have always been students without engaging in any extracurricular activities. What do I mean by that? An important aspect of leadership for me is about having a big picture of the project in mind and assertively stop other researchers from going to supposedly wrong direction. If this simple thing doesn’t happen, people might waste a lot of their energy, which roughly translates to money, and even might result in missing the deadline for submitting the paper. As a researcher, it makes you a valuable person if you have a leadership skill. Also, you have to keep in mind that your mentor is not perfect and sometimes you have to push/pull him.
The second thing is that nobody cares about your learning process. In the good companies, there is always a ladder and a performance review process. Employees try to develop their skills in order to raise their income. Team leaders also try to help you with this learning process because this affects their own income and status in the ladder as well. But what about when you work as a research assistant? There aren’t such things in there. You just have to deliver some tasks. If you do bad, they’ll just get rid of you. That’s all. There’s not necessarily someone to teach, guide, or coach you. As a result, you have to spend some extra time in order to learn some things and don’t limit yourself to just delivering your tasks.