The Hitchiker’s guide to the PhD is a small booklet meant the be given to anybody discovering research at internships, or starting a PhD. It summarizes quickly a few key facts, and should make people more prepared for research, and notably learn to discern what is normal, and what is not.

Highlevel summary and links

Let’s start with a good news:

74% of french doctorates are satisfied/very satisfied with their thesis. [1]

But:

24% of international doctorates meet the symptoms to be classified as clinically depressed; [satinsky2021systematic]
33% of 1877 french doctorates have been depressed; [2]
54% of french doctorates are exposed to stress; [1]
36,1 % out of 2100 french doctorates recognize having been victim of moral harassment or psychological violence. [3]
and finally, the report [1] is surprisingly optimistic on some points, and for instance states a global quitting rate for PhDs at 4%. However, another report states [4] that is is around 6% for technical sciences, and up to 40% for humanities.

This is the goal of this booklet, among other things. The booklet in pdf version can be found here:

For a ready to print and fold version, see here (landscape, two sided longedge).

Feel free to share and spread the booklet! I also encourage you to build on it or make feedback, it is freely accessible and editable here!

Sources of the PhD booklet

If you were interested in the booklet, below is the list of all the statistics and sources used to make it. To note, there is a mix of scientific and non-scientific studies, but in some cases, the lack of scientific studies is a bad sign.

It’s not your fault, part 1: any phd is hard

The bullet points and style are mostly inspired from Dr Zoe Ayres “Toxic Mix” posters. Some references are new.

Culture of silence:
- barely 8% of french doctorates say they have been well warned and taught about mental health risks, and 15% says a little bit. [1]
- at conferences, 66,9 % of victims do not make any report. [3]
overwork: 50% of internatioal phd student work over 50h/week [5],
Impostor syndrom: 50.6% of Ph.D. students in a belgian University believed they suffer from IP [6]
financial concerns: 44% of french doctorates under contracts and 49% of those with a grant have an insufficant salary that at least sometimes put them in a difficult position. [1] (the statistic in [1] is phrased in the opposite direction)
no more tick boxes: ref?
first time failing: ref?
competitive landscape: no two thesis are the same, comparing is often useless?
paper please: 65% of researchers indicated they were under tremendous pressure to publish papers [7]
isolation: 29% of french doctorates suffer from isolation [1]
culture of suffering: 42% of PhD students claimed that developing a mental health issue over the course of their research was considered “normal”. [8]
difficult relationship/bad advisor: 25% of international phd students would restart with a different adivsor [5]
bad career advertisement:
- 36% of french doctorates are worried about their careers [1]
- 29% of international phd given usefull career adivce [5]
- 50% of international phd don’t feel they can talk about not pursuing academia [5]
- ~10% at most of french doctorates will get a permanent position: ~14/15k thesis are delivered per year between 2014-2019, ~400 CR position at “EPST” (research centers) [9], and 1106 “MCF” (associate professor) positions open in 2021. [10]
- ~17,5% at most of french computer science doctorates will, with 933 thesis defended in 2023 [11], 8 CR at CNRS, 9 CR at INRIA, 17 ISFP (non civil servant permanent positions) Inria, 130 MCF at section 27 -> big fluctuations every year.

It’s not your fault, part 2: inequalities

Not everybody start with the same chances to make it through:

men are 2.6 times more likely to become PU
somebody without a declared disability is 4.6 times more likely to become a uni staff:
a white person is 6.2 times more likely to become a UK professor than a black person
somebody with a close relative with a PhD is at least 2.4 times more likely to get a PhD

(see the ressources page for computation details)

Further: * Working class in UK is 28% as likely to get a PHD vs privileged origins. [12] So, UK working class are 3 times less likely to get a PhD. * LGBT+ community have an increased risk of developing mental illness (1.5x higher than the general population) [13], (but slight overrepresentation of LGBT representation in [14])

All those are more likely to suffer for instance from impostor syndrom [18] or bullying/harassment (43% of UK researchers, vs 49% for women, 62% for disabled) [19] (37% of international researchers, vs 45% homosexual, 60% racialized) [7] (mostly by people in power positions, but also peers [19])

It’s not your fault, part3 : the advisor

Once again, the list is highly inspired from “Managing your Mental Health during your PhD: A Survival Guide. Dr Zoe Ayres.”.

This is where we are missing the most “scientific” foundations. An issue is maybe that we, advisors, are not willing enough to participate in studies, or maybe studies are not willing enough to question advisors?

What to do?

Most personal part, no particular references. Could be nice though.

[1]

Réseau national des collège doctoraux, “Enquete national.” 2023.

[2]

A. B. Combes, Comment l’université broie les jeunes chercheurs. Précarité, harcèlement, loi du silence. Autrement (Éditions), 2022.

[3]

French org, Observatoire des Violences Sexistes et Sexuelles dans l’Enseignement Supérieur, “Enquête doctorat 2024.” 2024.

[4]

AERES, “Synthèse des rapports d’évaluation des écoles doctorales de la vague d.” 2024.

[5]

C. Woolston, “PhDs: The tortuous truth,” Nature, vol. 575, no. 7782, pp. 403–407, 2019.

[6]

J. Van de Velde, K. Levecque, A. Mortier, and A. De Beuckelaer, “Why PhD students in flanders consider quitting their PhD,” ECOOM BRIEFS, no. 20, pp. 1–5, 2019.

[7]

C. Cerejo, M. Awati, and A. Hayward, “Joy and stress triggers: A global survey on mental health among researchers,” CACTUS Foundation, Solapur, 2020.

[8]

C. M. Hazell, J. E. Niven, L. Chapman, P. E. Roberts, S. Cartwright-Hatton, S. Valeix, and C. Berry, “Nationwide assessment of the mental health of UK doctoral researchers,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2021.

[9]

French Gov, Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation, “L’état de l’emploi scientifique en france - rapport 2023.”

[10]

French Gov, Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation, “Note de la DGRH- enseignement supérieur - n° 7 - septembre 2022.”

[11]

French Gov, Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation, “French PhD thesis repository.”

[12]

P. Wakeling and D. Laurison, “Are postgraduate qualifications the ‘new frontier of social mobility’?” The British journal of sociology, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 533–555, 2017.

[13]

M. King, J. Semlyen, S. S. Tai, H. Killaspy, D. Osborn, D. Popelyuk, and I. Nazareth, “A systematic review of mental disorder, suicide, and deliberate self harm in lesbian, gay and bisexual people,” BMC psychiatry, vol. 8, pp. 1–17, 2008.

[14]

J. Armstrong and A. Sullivan, “LGBT+ representation higher education in england and wales,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, pp. 1–17, 2024.

[15]

L. Le, “Unpacking the imposter syndrome and mental health as a person of color first generation college student within institutions of higher education,” McNair Research Journal SJSU, vol. 15, no. 1, p. 5, 2019.

[16]

C. L. Holden, L. E. Wright, A. M. Herring, and P. L. Sims, “Imposter syndrome among first-and continuing-generation college students: The roles of perfectionism and stress,” Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 726–740, 2024.

[17]

A. Chapman, “Using the assessment process to overcome imposter syndrome in mature students,” Journal of further and higher education, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 112–119, 2017.

[18]

M. J. Armstrong and L. M. Shulman, “Tackling the imposter phenomenon to advance women in neurology,” Neurology: Clinical Practice, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 155–159, 2019.

[19]

H. Moran, L. Karlin, E. Lauchlan, S. J. Rappaport, B. Bleasdale, L. Wild, and J. Dorr, “Understanding research culture: What researchers think about the culture they work in,” Wellcome Open Research, vol. 5, no. 201, p. 201, 2020.

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