Nature’s survey of more than 6,000 graduate students reveals the turbulent nature of doctoral research.
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.
In survey answers and free-text comments, students expressed widespread and deep-seated frustrations with training, work–life balance, incidents of bullying and harassment, and cloudy job prospects (see ‘Free thinking’). This year’s survey also included new questions suggested by early-career researchers, including ones on student debt, bullying and harassment, and carer responsibilities. A question about mental health — asked of all respondents for the first time — shed light on some of the more troubling effects of higher education.
But as with Nature’s previous surveys of doctoral students, the positives generally outweighed the negatives: 75% of respondents said they were at least somewhat satisfied with their decision to get a PhD, a slight decline from 78% in Nature’s most recent PhD-student survey, conducted two years ago1 (see ‘Sustained satisfaction’).
