For the next year, I will have four master thesis students joining in on my projects, so I will definitely be chilling day in day out (and this cute cat is happy to teach me how to do that).

No, I am just kidding, of course. It will be very rewarding to have such a large team, but I will have to put in a lot of effort to guide them along the way.

I will have a student on four different topics. For most of them, all data is already collected (with their help), but I only glanced at this data shortly, so they will have the chance to come up with the story first.

That last fact is important. I want them to have something new to discover, some science to do, some exciting and relevant stories to dig into. That is what I consider the first main pillar of a thesis under my supervision. The second pillar is guaranteed results. I have not looked into the data yet, but I am familiar with the experiments and datasets and I know that at least some important results will come out of it. What exactly, that is a surprise, but they will not have to go through the disappointment of a failed experiment.

So I will leave the chilling to the cat, who is definitely better at it than I am, while I try to guide the students towards a successful and satisfying master thesis.