From challenges to perspectives Reflections of young scientists on the current state of academic research

At the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), the PhD students organize an international symposium every 2 years. The authors of this article were all members of the organizing committee this year, and we are proud of the programme on offer, which includes a Nobel Prize winner and many other eminent speakers. Organizing the symposium has been a valuable experience for us, and a worthy addition to our CVs, but not everyone we have spoken to feels that way about extra‐curricular activities. When we advertised the symposium among our fellow PhD students, we often received comments that people were “too busy” to attend, or “had no time for these things,” or, perhaps worst of all, that their supervisor “would not allow them to come.” Those who did manage to come along this year showed a great deal of interest in one of our optional workshops: “How to stay sane during your PhD?” Overall, the behavior of our peers suggests to us that PhD students are under an unhealthy amount of pressure. When students experience so much pressure that they cannot make use of career‐enhancing opportunities, their workloads are clearly out of control and the output that their supervisors and universities expect of them might not align with what is best for the student's own career. Do we expect PhD students to be data‐generating publication machines, or is there room to cultivate a broader set of professional and cognitive skills, and to nurture the curiosity that brought them into science in the first place? The answers to these questions are complex and involve different aspects of current scientific practice, including publishing, policy, and funding. In this article, we summarize various imbalances in the current academic research system that we believe disadvantage young researchers; we discuss what this means for research in general; and …