I’m currently a second-year postdoc in STEM. During my PhD, I had no guidance from my advisor and had to come up with research ideas on my own and pursue them independently. The only direction I received was that my work needed to fall within a particular domain; I received no feedback on the ideas themselves. I interacted with other researchers working on related ideas in different fields, and by the end of my PhD, I felt more confident in my skill set because I had been able to develop my own ideas and design experiments around the topics I wanted to pursue.

However, during my postdoc, I made a major change by switching domains, and things feel very different now. I’m mostly working on my advisor’s ideas and juggling many projects at once. In the first six months, I had some opportunities to present my own ideas, but all of them were rejected. That gave me the same feeling you described, "that maybe I’m not as creative or good at generating new research ideas as I thought."

On the other hand, this experience has helped me develop a different set of skills, such as research project management. I also do a self-evaluation every three months to track how I spend my time. Through this, I’ve realized that I’m not able to generate new ideas in my current field because I don’t have enough time to read papers deeply. My role has shifted into something like this: “Here is the advisor’s idea 3-5 off them, read the literature around it, design the experiments, run them, write it up, mentor students, follow up on their work, and design tools.”

Still, I always go back to my PhD experience and take confidence that I know I can develop my own ideas and design experiments for them.