Vitamin B, Freudian Musings, and the Loneliness of PhD Life: What it also feels like for a grad student in Austria

The University of Warwick recently asked me to contribute to their student-run blog PhD life, a platform for grad students to discuss all the aspects that pursuing a doctorate involves, from “reaching out” to “moving on”. Make sure to check it out for its great tips and resources on publishing in journals, managing your viva, or organizing field trips!

Eager to be part of such a laudable initiative, I composed a nice little blog post about grad student life at the University of Vienna, my alma mater, with a focus on the various possibilities of financing a PhD in Austria. 

Graduation day. Universities with impressive ceremonial halls like the Uni of Vienna are at a clear advantage. 

Here’s a short excerpt of what I wrote in my blog post "Sacher cake, Gemütlichkeit, and a dissertation grant: What it feels like for a PhD student in Austria":

During my days as a doctoral student, I encountered three main ways of financing a PhD at an Austrian university (not counting rich parents or day jobs):

1. Get one of the rare university assistant positions, which are by definition fixed term and run for 3-4 years. Many of them are part-time, but don’t let that fool you: you are still expected to work 40 hours a week, it’s just that you only get paid 15. One of the advantages is that as a pre-doc university assistant, you are firmly affiliated with an institute and a professor, and writing your thesis is part of your job description.
2. Become a member of a research project (third-party funding).The big drawback, apart from the oftentimes short duration of projects: writing your thesis is typically not part of the project work you get paid for, so while you can at least sustain yourself with a decent salary, your dissertation essentially becomes your hobby to indulge in on weekends and holidays.
3. Get a doctoral grant/scholarship/fellowship from one of the national funding agencies, including the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW), the Austrian Exchange Agency (OEAD), or the university’s own research funds. Grants vary greatly in volume and duration (from roughly 1.000€/month for half a year to 35.000€/year for 3 years).

It was the latter option that worked out for me in the form of the two-year DOC fellowship program by the Austrian Academy of Science, one of the biggest and most prestigious grants for young researchers in Austria, and a so-called ‘Abschlussstipendium’ (roughly translates as Dissertation Completion Fellowship) by the University of Vienna for the remaining six months up until the official submission of my thesis.

And here’s what I would like to have written, if it wasn’t for the blog’s official affiliation with the University of Warwick and the fact that despite all the critical commentary I am about to make, I am still deeply grateful for having been given the opportunity to do a PhD. Notwithstanding my feelings of gratitude and the fact that overall, I greatly enjoyed working on my thesis, I feel an obligation - as a former member of and contributor to this system - to discuss some of the obstacles, challenges, and drawbacks grad students will invariably encounter when pursuing a doctorate at an Austrian university. 

I chose the latter of the above three options, although “choice” might be too strong a word because trust me, it wasn’t for lack of trying that the first two options didn’t work out for me. Overall, scoring a position at a university or a research institute heavily depends on what top executives call “networking” and Austrians lovingly dub “vitamin B”, with the “B” standing for “Beziehungen” (relationships). Not necessarily the romantic sort (though those might come into play, too), but the kind where your dad plays tennis with the head of the company that hires you or your M.A. supervisor once worked on a grant application with the project leader of your new research group.

It is an open secret that the majority of academic staff positions at Austrian universities, especially pre- and post-doc vacancies, have already been promised to a candidate before the actual call has been placed. Austrian law requires public universities to advertise all vacancies publicly (and run all applications through an equal treatment commission, which turns the whole process into quite a farce), even if they are intended as internal promotions.

Scholarships, on the other hand, have the benefit of involving an extensive, peer-reviewed, and anonymous selection process with international reviewers, so the chances for vitamin B to kick into play are substantially minimized. The downside, however, is that scholarship grantees are typically only loosely, if at all, affiliated with the university. While the department I was writing my PhD thesis in readily took me on board as a staff member, I was neither granted office space nor keys to access the building and its facilities.

For me, this arrangement basically meant that I spent the two years of my scholarship in increasing social isolation, as my teeny tiny flat had to double as office/library/cafeteria. Invitations by friends to join them for a cup of coffee or a pint where mostly declined for having to finish yet another page or chapter – after all, I was on this admittedly generous grant for only two years and had to cram in as much work as possible.

Me in the very midst of a wild writing frenzy. Pic found here.

In hindsight, this is *not* a route I can recommend. Doing a PhD, particularly in the humanities where collaborations and joint publications are already a lot rarer than in the natural or social sciences, is per se a lonely task. After detracting all the fringe activities like conference visits, teaching obligations, and research stays, what writing a thesis essentially boils down to is sitting down at your desk and actually *writing* the goddamn thing. This is hardly a fun group activity, and the solitude resulting from long hours and constant pressure can be considerable. In my experience, the fact that mental illness is on the rise in academia cannot exclusively be attributed to a persistently high work load and precarious employment conditions. Though these factors do play a significant role, it is also the often unwitting neglect of relationships and social networks that add to the erosion of one’s coping mechanisms in times of increased emotional stress.

With largely unstructured PhD programs and an insufficient number of positions to accommodate the increasing number of enrollments, Austrian grad students are certainly at risk of dealing with the bulk of both their professional and personal challenges on their own, particularly if they are not integrated into a department or research group. It should not go unnoticed, however, that the University of Vienna, always conscious of its gloried past, takes care of its students’ predicaments in original ways: Only a few doors down from Berggasse 19, where Sigmund Freud’s clients frequented his famous couch, the university’s Center for Doctoral Studies is located…

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A post-script on the above (I seem to be back to the old academic habit of not being able to write a single paragraph without heavily footnoting and qualifying it): It strikes me as peculiar that whenever I get to share my experience with fellow PhD students, such as in a focus group I recently participated in, the one topic that will eventually and unavoidably always catch up on us, it seems, is mental illness and social isolation.

Indeed, it appears to be a cynical sort of truism that depression, anxiety, and other disorders are on the rise in academia, also and often particularly affecting PhD students as the most precarious and least powerful group involved. In the last couple of years, a range of significant studies have been conducted (see, for instance, the one published by the UK’s University and College Union with a sample of 14.000 university employees), attributing the increase to constant pressure, high work load, a virtually non-existing work-life balance, perfectionism, and an uncaring work environment.

It seems to me that another factor contributing vitally to the rise of mental illness among academics (which, due to word limit, only got a passing mention in my post) is loneliness. Now solitude is usually not at all a problem for the ‘typical’ academic (whoever that is…) when all goes well: Many of my PhD colleagues, myself included, enjoy living and working on their own, having the apartment, the office or the archive to themselves and generally appreciate the quietness and stillness that comes with academic work, also and especially because it allows them to focus entirely on the things they love to do. When it does, at least in my experience, get ugly is when you enter a phase of increased professional or emotional stress, often caused by serendipitous external events, such the loss of loved ones, break-ups, or severe illness. This is what we essentially need our social relationships for; after all, sharing your story is an essential coping mechanism for negative stress and worry.

From: PhD comics

In many employment and/or funding arrangements such as the ones discussed above, PhD students are more or less left on their own, as pursuing a doctorate is after all a necessarily solitary task. Structured PhD programs such as the ones currently being implemented in Austria and already largely in place in the Anglo-American university system can certainly offer a remedy. Platforms like the University of Warwick’s PhD blog and student initiatives like writing groups and joint work spaces are another way of creating communities and allowing intellectual exchange. 

What is also needed, however, is a general awareness for and appreciation of the fact that PhD students, who are typically in their mid to late twenties, and thus at the very start of their professional life, are contributing to their field by conducting vital research and have a right to be thoroughly integrated in their workplace and mentored by their elders, just like in any other job environment. It would probably strike us as absurd (and, in the worst case, dangerous) for an apprentice fitter or young hospital nurse starting on their very first job to be let loose on their tasks with hardly any guidance at all, and to work in relative isolation from any of their senior colleagues who could serve as valuable role models. Is it because we feel that grad students in particular and academics in general can’t do much damage (and, conversely, make an impact) that the same reaction of outrage which such an approach would engender 'in the real world' is remarkably absent in a university setting? What a fatal assumption that would be...