I got authorship. The problem is that if I came up with the idea I'd have to be listed as the lead author, and that didn't seem to go over well. If I just con

I got authorship. The problem is that if I came up with the idea I'd have to be listed as the lead author, and that didn't seem to go over well. If I just contributed to their ideas they were fine with that. It varied per prof, some were happy to work on ideas from anyone because they saw the development of an idea as the important part, some were very strict about not accepting primary concepts that they or their grad students didn't come up with. Some listed a lead author, some put authors in alphabetical order. In one case I discovered the cause, we'd been brainstorming about new ideas for a while and I suggested a combination of several of those ideas that seemed interesting. They all got flustered and pushed the idea aside. I learned quite a while later (after we'd actually built that system) they had filed a patent a few days before for almost the identical idea and decided to leave me out of it. It made building the system awkward because they were continually coming up with alternate explanations for why this wasn't the same as the idea I had presented (and they had already also had and patented). I didn't work with them much longer.