Mentoring roles =============== * Academic supervisors are usually extremely busy. * Supervisors are sometimes min-maxed to producing articles at the cost of other skills. * This leads to a situation where the supervisor can't provide all of the needed mentoring. Maybe they can give a great idea and write a good people, but not tell someone which tools to use to do it well. What is a research engineer? ---------------------------- * Someone that works on making research work well, not simply focused on making the next academic level or getting more first author papers. * So they have time and freedom to do useful mentoring. * Thus, they are designed to help grow your research and can mentor in research processes. * Common names: Staff Scientist, Laboratory manager, Research Software Engineer. * Have time to co-work rather than just tell people what to do and wish good luck at it. Research engineers to support your group ---------------------------------------- * But you can also hire people with the explicit purpose of supporting your other researchers, instead of someone with the goal of advancing their own career. * HR may not allow this since they don't fit in the hierarchy. * You probably can't do what is suggested here, but it's something to think about.