The Postdoc Contradiction: Building Independence While Working on Someone Else's Vision
Postdocs are told to "develop your independent research identity." But you're working on your PI's grants. Their funded projects. Their research questions. How are you supposed to build a program that fits YOU when your work is structured around someone else's vision?
This isn't a personal failing. It's a structural contradiction built into how postdoc positions work. And it's why drift happens: not through one wrong turn, but through a series of reasonable decisions that gradually pull you away from what originally drew you to research.
The Expectation versus the Reality
The expectation is clear: use your postdoc years to establish your research direction, build your CV, and prepare for the faculty job market or your next career move.
But the day-to-day reality? You're working on projects that were funded before you arrived, using methods your PI chose. You're contributing to their research vision, not building your own.
I've written before about how my own postdoc work drifted from my PhD interests. What I didn't see at the time was the pattern beneath it. I took positions based on relationships, geography, and practicality. I said yes to projects because they were funded or because my PI asked. I kept my actual interests alive through unfunded collaborations on the side. Each decision made sense in the moment, but cumulatively they pulled me in directions I hadn't intended to go.
The Pattern
This isn't unique. Postdocs get chosen for reasons that have little to do with research fit: grant funding, legacy work, mentorship opportunities, strategic positioning, or learning new skills.
Each decision is reasonable on its own. But over time, these WHYs accumulate. Genuine curiosity can shrink to 20% or less of what drives your work. Years pass, and you find yourself in a research program that looks good on paper but doesn't align with what you care about.
Mapping It Out
Recently, I mapped out what I was working on during each stage of my career, and more importantly, WHY I was doing it.
What percentage of my time was driven by genuine curiosity versus funding, strategy, or obligation? When did my own interests become secondary? What did I try to keep alive on the side?
Seeing this visually gave me perspective I didn't have before.
Want to see where your drift happened? I created a free template to help you map your research journey and identify the WHYs that shaped your path. Download the free template here. It takes about 20 minutes and might give you clarity you didn't have before.
Finding Some Agency
Understanding the pattern isn't about judgment. It's about seeing what’s been driving your decisions so you can make different choices going forward.
This also isn't about only choosing projects motivated by pure interest. It's about finding ways to work within real constraints while keeping your throughline alive.
Is there a twist you can put on a project that uses your own unique lens? Is there a method you're curious about? Is there an underlying community you're serving that taps into a value that matters to you?
Reflecting on these questions might shift how you see your work. Instead of feeling like all your time is spent on things you don't care about, you might find pieces that DO connect to your deeper motivations, even within projects assigned by your PI. It's about finding the thread that makes it feel connected and intentional.
The template shows you WHERE the drift happened. If you want to go deeper, I work with both individuals and groups:
Workshops for postdoc cohorts, junior faculty groups, and early-career researchers navigating career transitions together
Individual sessions for personalized guidance
Why Your Postdoc Feels Scattered: Fragmentation, Burnout, and Finding Your Throughline
If your postdoc or research role feels scattered, like you’re constantly juggling projects and reacting to whatever funding comes through, it makes sense. It’s genuinely hard to build something coherent in that environment.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking with a number of researchers about this feeling of fragmentation. What I’ve noticed is that this isn’t about individual focus or discipline. It’s structural. Soft money, short-term funding, and constant pivots make it hard to shape your work with intention.
On top of that, people simply work differently: some thrive going deep on one narrow question, while others do better with a small portfolio of projects.
The challenge isn’t forcing yourself into one model. It’s learning how to design your work deliberately and find the throughline that makes it all feel connected.
I started with a clear “why”
My PhD began with a love of languages. I fell into psycholinguistics because it let me combine biology with questions about the structure of language. It felt aligned and curiosity-driven, and I had a strong sense of purpose.
Then I started my first postdoc. I moved to a new city (and a new country) where I didn’t know anyone. While struggling with the change in environment, I was also adapting to a new research culture.
The institute where I landed was run entirely on soft money, so my work followed whatever projects had just been funded. Like many postdocs, the projects were adjacent to my interests rather than fully aligned, and they didn’t always connect to each other. My second postdoc was similar, even though the environment and topics were different.
The drift I didn’t notice
Over time, my CV filled up with projects that were adjacent to my original interests rather than truly aligned with them. When I went on the job market, that patchwork of projects naturally shaped the research program I could propose.
Somewhere along the way, my research had drifted, and my sense of why drifted with it.
I didn’t fully see it at the time, but I think that loss of clarity contributed to the burnout I later felt as a faculty member. It’s hard to stay energized when you’re no longer sure what thread connects your work, or when the program you’re running doesn’t fully align with your deeper motivations.
When I moved to industry, the same sense of being scattered showed up again. I had changed fields from educational neuroscience into healthcare data science and AI, and for a long stretch I couldn’t see how my past work connected to my current work. That uncertainty brought a lot of doubt with it.
What finally helped
What helped wasn’t finding the perfect title or perfectly aligned job. The shift came when I started paying attention to the questions that kept following me from one setting to another.
Instead of asking whether a position matched my background, I began asking what problems I kept caring about no matter where I was working.
I noticed that I was always drawn back to the same themes: how data can guide more personalized decisions, and how we communicate science in ways that genuinely help people. Even as the fields and job titles changed, those questions stayed consistent. They became the throughline that connected everything.
Holding onto the thread
Having gone through this myself, I now help researchers step back and see the thread that’s already there: the questions, skills, and motivations that connect their work across projects and roles.
Careers don’t have to look linear to be meaningful. But it helps enormously to understand what ties the pieces together, especially when everything around you keeps shifting.
That sense of coherence can be the difference between feeling scattered and feeling like you’re moving forward with intention.
A small reflection, if you’re in this phase
If any of this feels familiar, it might help to pause and ask yourself:
What kinds of problems do I keep returning to, even when the projects change?
What skills or ways of thinking show up again and again?
When have I felt most engaged?
If titles and funding constraints disappeared, what questions would I still want to pursue?
Often there’s a thread already there. It just takes a bit of distance to see how the pieces connect.
From Scattered Ideas to a Focused Research Plan
What happens when you say yes to good projects that don’t quite fit? A reflection on early-career research, burnout, and why a clear roadmap matters.
Now that the new year has started, many researchers are no doubt thinking about their research plans for the months ahead. With everything going on, it can feel harder than usual to focus, plan, or hold big-picture questions.
I was in a tenure-track faculty role for three years. When I started, I already had some existing projects and collaborations (part of the reason I felt the university was a good fit for my work), but I also wanted to launch new initiatives to gain momentum for the lab.
However, the challenge was that I lacked strategic direction. Most of the activities I said 'yes' to were things I felt I should be doing as a new faculty member, rather than actions that fit into an overarching, coherent vision for my lab. As a result, it felt like I had a jumble of competing priorities and scattered ideas vying for my attention.
Three Projects That Helped Me Understand the Cost of Misalignment
To be clear, I really enjoyed working with all my collaborators. The people were fantastic. The issue wasn’t who I worked with, but rather that the projects themselves weren’t always aligned with my long-term vision for my research, coupled with the fact that I didn't have a very strong vision to begin with!
My lab focused on the brain organization for reading and language in children and adults, with an emphasis on learning challenges and bilingualism. These three projects fell well outside that focus, but I said yes to them anyway.
Basic visual processing study. I agreed to direct a component of a project on basic visual processing because it seemed like a quick way to get my EEG lab running and to help students gain hands-on experience in data collection.
EEG in clinical populations. I joined a grant team for a project in a clinical setting, hoping to network with other researchers and build connections for future collaborations.
Student-driven social impact project. A student wanted to extend a class assignment into a publication. The project was meaningful and aligned with broader social issues I care deeply about, but it wasn’t connected to my lab’s core focus.
In each case, the project itself was valuable and interesting. But by saying yes without a clear framework for alignment, my attention and energy were pulled in directions that didn’t serve my main goals.
A Clearer Roadmap
It could be argued that these weren't poor choices. There were good motivations behind them. But all three did contribute to me feeling like my research was scattered and that the bulk of my time was spent doing a bunch of random projects that diluted the 'brand' of my lab. As a consequence, I lacked momentum, and I felt like I was stretched too thin. Of course, these weren't the only factors -- there was also a global pandemic going on -- but I can trace some of the origins of my exhaustion and burnout to this feeling.
At the same time, I said yes to a number of projects that did fit into a larger plan, and I'm glad I did. However, looking back now, I can see that a clearer roadmap would have gone a long way toward refining my confidence when making decisions about where to focus my energy.
With this roadmap in hand, I could have asked myself a few simple questions before committing to new projects:
Does this align with my long-term vision?
Does it move my core research forward?
What am I saying no to by saying yes?
Asking these questions can create a sense of calm and clarity, helping you make choices about projects, collaborations, and requests with purpose. Even small steps toward alignment can dramatically boost how confident and energized you feel about your research.