Good question. I work closely with my two supervisors and together we figure out where best to go next. At the end of the day, it is my PhD that I am working on so I can choose what I do when, but I am strongly guided by them as they have much more experience than me! I am lucky to have quite a lot of flexibility in my project, so if one area gets really interesting then I can concentrate working on that.
It used to be that my supervisor choose what I researched but now as long as I can explain why I think something is interesting then I can choose for myself which is exceptionally exciting!
I would say a bit of both. To begin with, your supervisor tells you what your project is and what to do. Then, as you continue, you begin to make it your own, coming up with new ideas and trying to follow them. At the end of your PhD you are the true expert in what you have done and the project is yours.
If you work in industry I imagine you have less flexibility, but it depends.
I meet with my two supervisors regularly and we decide initially what I should be focusing on with my work to help develop our research. However, I can then go away and plan my own experiments around this and decide what I want to do on a day to day basis. As a PhD student, it is your research that you are going to have to write up at the end, so explaining why and what you did at each step is important.
It is a mixture of both. I do whatever experiments i would like to do, however those experiments will be within a large boundary set out by the funding bodies who fund my research. So a mix of both i would say.
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