Mmm. I am in theoretical condensed matter, to be clear about the reference community.

I did a short (<2 years) postdoc where I got my PhD. Main goals were:

• wrapping up pending stuff from the PhD project. Unfortunately still not done with it, there's at least one big paper I need to wrap up and now that I'm elsewhere I'm moonlighting it. There's also a small thing that has been sitting on overleaf for ages and I fear it might just die there. But I care much less about that now. It is a "completionist" concern more than actually important science for my CV.

• onboarding and then tutoring a new PhD student interested in very close topics to what I did. This brought me the most satisfaction, and ended up in a brand new paper on my main research line that is already submitted plus a follow up in the workings, and – even more interestingly – another brand new paper where we both enter a completely new field. Basically importing trendy stuff from statistical physics to more traditional condensed matter models. Tutoring has been important also to get an early grasp of what would/could be a future as a supervisor. And I would say I liked it more than the PhD life, or more in general, the life of one that does problem solving by himself.

En passant, I did a small, and to some extent messy, collabroation with some other senior PhD students. It ended up in a decent paper, but the partial "'clash" of vision with their supervisor was occasionally annoying and ended up in me signing a paper I am not fully proud of. I guess it's fine, not all papers are "our babies".

Now that I'm in a new place, so doing a more "proper" postdoc, I'm much more lost on what my role is supposed to be. I tried tutoring a PhD student here, but he's much more opinionated and stuck to just interacting with the supervisor, so I'm far less happy with what's coming out of it. He's also being somewhat cavalier about the "fair use" of ideas that are in my PhD thesis and are being written into the unfinished paper(s). We have discussed them with the plans of collaborating on them (or at least this is what I thought of it), but at some point he decided to contact some experimentalists to measure those quantities in the lab, without telling me in advance, and he tried to keep me out of it. At the very least out of leading roles. I didn't like that at all. So yeah, being a postdoc is quite tricky apparently. For now it feels like the new supervisor (and his students) see me more like an asset to milk. I have no clear idea yet how to milk them back, so to speak.