Our first question comes from Lena, who says, "What would you recommend to those who don't have a mentor? You mentioned a couple of times the necessity to have a mentor, especially in an academic career, but I'm very unfortunate in this regard. My PhD supervisor is far from being a star in his field and has very poor supervising skills." Well, Lena, usually what I advise is that if you don't have a good mentor, get a good peer group.

I mean, actually, this is quite common. This was, for example, relatively standard in the theory group at MIT where I was doing my doctoral training. It was very peer group focused, so you would assemble a collection of collaborators of fellow graduate students and postdocs, and you would work with them to come up with ideas and create new research directions.

Now, I think this was common, in particular in the theory group, because A, the type of work we did was such that you didn't need, for example, a really well-funded physical laboratory. You weren't tied to a grant in the way you might be if you worked in a biology lab where it says, "Look, we hired you to do these assays, and we need you to do these assays." It was a lot more flexible when you're doing mathematics, but also these professors in that department were very famous, and they had famous people things to do.

These were really big-name scholars. There was multiple Turing Award winners. There was multiple Genius Grant Award winners. They often had large research groups, and so there was just a real culture of come up with an almost entrepreneurial startup-like collection of peers to work with. And in fact, a lot of my work was done that way.

I did a lot of good work with my advisor as well, but I did a lot of work with these peers, many of whom I still collaborate with today. So Lena, this is a known model, and it's what I'm going to suggest to you. Find other researchers who are doctoral students or postdocs that you like, that are interesting, that are working on interesting things, and start working on interesting things with them.

I think you can learn quite a lot that way. I know you mentioned your question that I advise always getting a mentor in academia. That's not actually something I advise. I think it's fine, but I don't think it's a necessary condition for success. So look for the people around you you can control.

Make them as good as possible.