Cutting the Academic Umbilical Cord
On the perils of collaborating with old mentors.
My message in this post is very simple: if you are new faculty, you should stop collaborating with your Ph.D. advisor or postdoc mentor after you leave, at least until you get tenure or promotion.
Look, I get it: you’ve worked with your advisor or mentor for several years, and you know them well. You have a good working relationship, and besides, they are brilliant researchers. Why would you ever give up working with them? Also, isn’t it kind of flattering that they still want to work with you?
And yes, there is obviously going to be some latency between you leaving their institution and the last of the papers you two co-authored getting published. You may even have an ongoing joint project that you started together, perhaps even one that is externally funded, so it will take some time before that is finally over and done.
My advice stands. Get the work published as soon as possible and bow out of the joint research project at your earliest opportunity.
But why?
The Ph.D. is supposed to be a driver’s license for research. It shows that you have learned enough about science to lead your own research projects. In some academic systems, it means that you are even trusted to advise your own Ph.D. students. But if you insist on continuing to work with your old Ph.D. advisor or postdoc mentor, you are signaling to the world that you do not feel ready, and that you want to keep the relationship going because you lack confidence and independence.
Most tenure and promotion review processes and even early career grant programs (such as the European ERC Starting Grant program) will assess your ability to conduct independent research. If you keep publishing with your old advisor or mentor, your independence will be called into question. My advice — that I myself received when I was on the tenure track — is to go cold turkey for the duration of your tenure track time until you have proven that you can stand on your own two legs.
If nothing else, cutting this “academic umbilical cord” will help you grow as a researcher and to learn to think for yourself. Now is the time to recruit and train your own students so that they can succeed in their own right.
And advisors: I know it is tempting to keep going back to the well. Your students are brilliant — after all, you trained them yourself! — so it is only natural to want to work with them even after they fly the roost for their own faculty careers. But consider that you are not really doing them any favors in the eyes of the world by continuing to work with them. Also note that even if they have left, the power dynamic is not entirely even — they may find it hard to decline even if they would rather prefer to be independent. You had your chance to work with them when they were still in your lab. Now they are in a new phase of their careers where demonstrating independence is of vital importance. You can resume the collaboration — if they are still willing! — when they earn tenure and promotion in their own right and by their own devices.
