We just hosted a lab tour of shortlisted applicants to Newcastle’s Wellcome-Trust-funded 4-year neuroscience PhD theme. We only had half an hour, but in this time Paul, James, Zoltan, Parto and Lisa each gave a dynamic and lucid summary of their work, its motivation and important, and showed off their stimuli / insects / smartphones (delete as appropriate). On the way out one of the applicants said to me, “And what do YOU do?” I just waved a hand airily and said, “Oh, I supervise, you know…” Frankly with this team I’m fairly redundant but I like to think I look decorative.