I am only one week here, and I have not done much more than handling all kinds of administrative matters. Still, my fingers are itching, and I cannot wait to start writing about my experiences of my postdoc life. It is, however, difficult to decide on what I will write about first as I can easily come up with more than 25 topics. Fortunately, I have plenty of time in the coming period to address all these different ideas, so it basically does not matter much which one I will choose at the moment. Well, maybe it does matter. There is something I need to confess, a major misunderstanding from my side, which recently became clear to me. You will find out more about this misunderstanding in the text below, but for now please keep in mind that I, Frank Klont, admit that I was (and probably still am) naive and short-sighted.
Let me start by stating that I already love my new colleagues. I feel so welcome in the group, and I could not have imagined a better start. Alright, those who know me will take these words with a pinch of salt as I am an easy lover, albeit not the type of easy lover that Phil Collins and Philip Bailey referred to. For this time, I advise you to be kind to your kidneys and leave the salt shaker in the kitchen cupboard. Actually, just leave it there and be kind to your kidneys for the rest of your life.
Back to my colleagues, they are very open and eager to help me with all kinds of administrative and work-related issues. They furthermore helped me to get familiarized with the department culture, and, most importantly, they gladly accepted my invitation to get to know each other better by having some after work drinks last Thursday (I brought my favorite jenever from Hooghoudt, a major Dutch distillery, which we mixed with tonic water to get the best possible tonic-based cocktail). I think I was at home by midnight that evening, so we did a good job taking into account that we started at 5 PM. (@mom: we drank responsibly, so please do not worry)
Concerning these colleagues, I tried to put myself in their position and started guessing what they might think of me. The reason I did this, is the fact that I always had quite high expectations of postdocs, and I felt like reevaluating these expectations now I am a postdoc myself. These expectations were probably formed during my first year as a PhD student when I was still a rooky and when I started working in a group with three senior postdocs. They knew so much and I so little, and they could answer all my questions and help me with all my experiments. The gap in knowledge and expertise between them and me was so large, and that was probably the time that I started believing that a postdoc is person that PhD students refer to when they need help (instead of the other way around). Likely, I was not the only PhD student with such expectations, as during my PhD I heard quite a lot of PhD students complaining about the limited (relevant) expertise and knowledge of new postdocs in their groups. This is, however, not an excuse, but merely a reference to observations I did in the past years.
Back to the present, I feel like a total rooky in my new department, and that was actually my intention. Rather than continuing on a topic which I arguably already mastered during my PhD, I wanted to do something different in order to grow as a researcher and as a person. As a matter of fact, I think that I should diversify myself for quite a bit longer before I think about creating a research niche, which may hopefully become my academic specialty in due time. As I now see and understand, the desire to diversify is a key driver for many novice postdocs, which I believe is a good thing. And thus, even though I have some expertise which could be relevant for my new colleagues to some extent, I will likely ask them for help more often than they will ask me. Also, I cannot help but concluding that I have become the type of postdoc which fails to meet the expectations that I kept as a PhD student.
So, dear new colleagues, I would like to ask you to forgive me for being a postdoc without a relevant background from the perspectives of the group. I am here to learn, and I hope you want to help me with that. Of course, if there is anything that I can do for you, please let me know.
And, dear postdocs who wanted to diversify in the time that I was still a PhD student, I understand you now ( I guess), and I am sorry that I sometimes thought about you in a naive and short-sighted way.
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