A PhD candidate is also a student

Are they PhD candidates, or PhD students? That is the question that has been on my mind since May 18, when De Jonge Akademie organised the Profkip Symposium in response to the report they published in March on “De Profkip”: the archetypal professor who has too many PhD candidates under their wings. During a panel discussion, Martijn van der Meer of the Promovendi Netwerk Nederland said that PhD candidates should be viewed as colleagues rather than as students.

I fundamentally agree with that. We can be proud in the Netherlands that the vast majority of PhD candidates work on their PhD as a job, with corresponding employment conditions. PhD candidates do important work and should be financially well-compensated for it. But the longer I think about Martijn’s comment, the more I realize that this question about the status of PhD candidates leads to the heart of the discussion about the quality of PhD supervision.

After all, a PhD is also (primarily?) a training to become a researcher. And we’re very good at training people at a university. It’s no coincidence that all PhD candidates are affiliated with a Graduate School—with the emphasis on “school.” So why is there so little attention for the training of PhD students?

At the Graduate School of Natural Sciences, I hear far too often that training for PhD candidates is a “waste of time.” I know supervisors who actively discourage PhD candidates from developing their communication or writing skills because that would take time away from the lab. As chair of the School, I have no means of forcing these supervisors to allow their PhD candidates to take these training courses. But I believe that training in for example project management, research data management, or open science is indeed worthwhile for every PhD candidate.

That needs to change. We sometimes need to protect PhD candidates from their own supervisors; who, unfortunately, all too often have interests other than those of the PhD candidates themselves. Supervisors want research to be conducted, because that is what they promised the funder. But for the PhD candidate, the PhD program is first and foremost an opportunity to develop as a researcher. Surely it cannot be the case that the supervisor determines what a PhD candidate can and may learn? The university should give the Graduate Schools more tools to ensure the proper training of PhD candidates.

PhD candidates are, first and foremost, university employees. But they do have special needs. So it’s not a bad idea when they occasionally act like students.