PhDs: the tortuous truth | Careers - Nature.com

Chris Woolston, freelance writer in Billings, Montana reports, Nature’s survey of more than 6,000 graduate students reveals the turbulent nature of doctoral research. 

Photo: JumpStory

Getting a PhD is never easy, but it’s fair to say that Marina Kovačević had it especially hard. A third-year chemistry student at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, she started her PhD programme with no funding, which forced her to get side jobs bartending and waitressing. When a funded position came up in another laboratory two years later, she made an abrupt switch from medicinal chemistry to computational chemistry. With the additional side jobs, long hours in the lab, and the total overhaul of her research and area of focus, Kovačević epitomizes the overworked, overextended PhD student with an uncertain future.

And yet she could hardly be happier. “I think I’m exactly where I need to be,” she says. “I love going to work each day. I have lots of things to do, but I’m not stressed. I can’t imagine anything else that would bring me this much joy.”

The results of Nature’s fifth survey of PhD students bear out Kovačević’s experience, telling a story of personal reward and resilience against a backdrop of stress, uncertainty and struggles with depression and anxiety. The survey drew self-selecting responses from more than 6,300 early-career researchers — the most in the survey’s ten-year history. The respondents hail from every part of the globe and represent the full spectrum of scientific fields...

Institutions also have much to learn. This survey and others like it should point the way for institutions trying to adapt to the needs of their students, Gotian says. Even though a majority of students are satisfied with their programmes, she says, their complaints and frustrations deserve close attention. “We don’t want to run programmes the way we did 20 years ago,” she says. “People have changed, technology has changed, the job market has changed. We need to constantly evolve.”
Read more... 

Additional resources
Nature 575, 403-406 (2019) 
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03459-7  

Source: Nature.com