Not only my lab work got going again this month but also the academic year kicked off in September. Thousands of ambitious students are eager to learn all kinds of new things here at the University of Geneva, and three of them joined our lab to carry out their Master’s research projects. To them I would like to say: welcome to the department of Life Sciences Mass Spectrometry. May you have a good time and may you learn a lot in the coming nine months.
During my PhD, I had the pleasure of supervising 7 BSc/Msc students, and without a doubt I can say that my supervision tasks were really a pleasure. I was thus very happy when I was granted the opportunity to work together with one of the three MSc students who joined our lab recently. Of course, I do not have much experience (yet) with the work carried out in the lab, so supervising this student will be more difficult as compared to the last few students I supervised (in the Netherlands). Fortunately for me, the student in question is a very bright and enthusiastic person who shows talent for the work we do. I probably do not need to worry much about the outcomes of this person’s project, although I should be cautious not to slow down this person in its ambitions, developments, and progress.
The thing is, such slowing down is often lurking when supervising very talented people, as I experienced during the last year of my PhD. In that year, I supervised a MSc student who was working on a project which required this person to be inventive, creative, stress resistant, and diligent in order to have some sort of chance to be successful in the end. It sometimes felt like this student was an ostrich that needed to learn how to fly and that received flying lessons from a penguin. Despite the odds being stacked against us, success was achieved in this project, and I could actually make relevant contributions to the project. Still, I cannot help but wondering whether success could have been achieved more efficiently if my supervision would have been better or if someone else would have been this student’s supervisor.
To be completely honest, I know that my supervision was not perfect. I clearly lack sufficient experience with supervision, and that is why I will seize any opportunity to become a better supervisor. I thus gladly accepted the supervision tasks that were offered to me which I will carry out to the best of my ability.
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