The department had a CASE (I think that’s right, it was 7 years ago since I left) award which funded the fairly broad topic of resilient electronics over multiple years and I was able to carve out a segment of that for high temperature energy harvesting (no point developing high temperature sensors if you can power them). I decided the direction, I determined what the project needed and so long as it worked towards high temperature energy harvesting I was good to go. My supervisor was amazing, on day 1 he said “I have two aims. 1: to get you passed and out the door in 3 years and 2: make sure you could do my job at the end of those three years” as a result of point 2 we were given a lot of breadth on self management and point 1 meant he was always around if we needed him - I never had to wait more than 6 hours to see him unless he was on holiday