Just out of curiosity, how many of you continued with the same tool/topic after your PhD? (Not just in the same field/sub-discipline) #AcadmicSky
I did so over the first two postdoc years, in the same lab as the one where I did my PhD but focusing on another region. Then, I moved abroad for three years and a half to do something different but still with molecular tools. Now, I have returned to my PhD tool and place for another adventure.
Same tool but I focused on modern 🌊 chemistry as a post doc after getting my PhD in (mostly) paleo 🌊. They’re different communities which meant a bit of starting over, which was fun! But I’m pretty sure it hurt my career. For example, colleagues said things like “I don’t know what he does“
Tools change rapidly (even more rapidly now). I continued to study the genetic basis of cell fate choice in embryos, but with a tool set that now included good antibodies and confocal microscopy. The development of the blast algorithm also was ground-breaking
I did, but I also started doing other things. Research tends to branch out and just become more diverse after the PhD.
Same tool broadly speaking (field work, clastic sedimentology), but huge change in context and subfields (from Quaternary geology to modern geomorphology and basin geology). Lately also working with ecosystem links to physical environment and palaeoclimate proxies.
A postdoc position is often (almost always) chosen to learn a new skill or subfield, but broadly speaking I continued with the same tools and topics. The tools I use now are not what I used then, but they are descended from them via multiple improvements in the technology.
Immediately after, my first postdoc? No. Switched topic. Came back to doctoral kings of things later.
I did. Stayed in the same institution, same corridor. Same supervisors. Moved to my own office though. For me, the "PhD" was just a point in time exactly four years after I started, in which some of what I've done up to that point ended up in a document called a "thesis".
Same tool, but several different questions