PhD students need support at the best of the times. How can you help in a pandemic? | PhD students - The Conversation AU

Melissa Hart, Graduate Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, UNSW  summarizes, Life for graduate students can be hard work and often isolating, and COVID-19 piled on the pressures. That's when having an academic leader and program dedicated to supporting them proved its worth.

The loss of in-person contact with supervisors and peers has added to the challenges graduate students face.
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A typical Australian PhD often involves a focused research project at one university, with one to two supervisors, and often far from your home or home country. It can be a quite isolating experience.

PhD students are also at great risk of mental health problems. A pre-COVID study from Belgium found one in two PhD students experiences psychological distress. One in three is at risk of psychiatric disorder.

And this year a pandemic has been thrown into the mix...

We do not know how long this pandemic will last. What we do know is all current and any incoming PhD candidates will feel the impacts in some way. With PhD students producing more than half of university research in Australia, this crisis illustrates the importance of ongoing development and support of higher-degree research students.

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Source: The Conversation AU