Question: A friend of mine and I were talking today about what it’s like to be newly minted Ph.D.’s, working on our first jobs. We became more independent of our Ph.D. advisers throughout graduate school and the postdoc period, but we’re curious about what comes next. We’re both still involved with them in co-authored projects. However it feels a little odd since we’re more like peers with our advisers now than we were as graduate students.

What does it mean to be more equal? Do we play different roles? What’s the norm, and how big is the range? It used to be that we had “a right” to demand our advisers’ time since we were paying students. Do we have those same privileges now?

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed: From Advisee to Peer.

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