The Checkbox.
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash
There’s a small checkbox on my university profile page, sitting quietly between my publications and what I can only describe as aspirational research interests, that indicates whether I’m “accepting PhD students.” It’s easy to overlook. I had overlooked it for years, actually, until last month, when I unticked it.
I want to be careful about what that means, because the temptation to turn it into a sweeping statement is real and I’ve learned to be suspicious of those. It’s more of an update than a declaration — a shift in default rather than a permanent door closing. Given where I am, what the system looks like right now, and what I know about myself after doing this job for a while, the calculus changed. Exceptions will happen, because they always do in academic life, and with enough hindsight exceptions have a funny way of getting rebranded as the plan all along. But the default changed.
I’m writing this while mentally preparing feedback for an upcoming PhD defense, which may or may not be relevant context. The line between honest reflection and elaborate post-hoc rationalization is thinner than most people admit, and I’m not going to pretend I’m definitely on the right side of it. Correlation isn’t causation. It’s just sometimes very, very suggestive.
Before anything else, though, I want to be completely clear about something: this is not about my PhD students. Not even a little. I loved working with them, and I am genuinely proud — in a way that outweighs most things I’ve done in this job — of what they’ve made of their careers. If there’s any discomfort in writing this at all, it’s partly because of how much I valued that work. The decision isn’t a verdict on those experiences. It’s a response to everything around them.
The system
The Dutch academic system has developed, over the years, a somewhat peculiar relationship with doctoral education. It is very good at training PhD students — genuinely, seriously good — and considerably less thoughtful about what it expects those people to do once they’re trained. The appetite for more PhD positions seems to exist largely independent of any serious reckoning with the job market those students will eventually face. More positions are opened, more students are recruited, and the whole machinery hums along with an institutional optimism that I find increasingly hard to share.
The consequence is that many genuinely talented scholars end up in industry, which is not a bad outcome for them — often it’s a very good one — but it creates a quiet and underacknowledged problem for the research itself. Work that was started together, sometimes over years, doesn’t always make it to publication, because at some point it stops being reasonable to ask someone who has moved on, built a different career, and is no longer paid to do this, to spend their evenings revising a manuscript. Just last week I got an acceptance for a paper with a PhD student who graduated three years ago. Three years. The acceptance felt good, genuinely, but it also came with a pang of something uncomfortable — this person has had a whole other job for three years, and somewhere in between they were still finding time to respond to reviewer comments that were, frankly, not their problem anymore. That’s not a sustainable arrangement, and it’s not one I feel entirely good about.
This matters to me because supervision, as I’ve always understood it, involves at least some responsibility for that question — not full responsibility, a supervisor isn’t a careers service, but you’re not entirely uninvolved in how someone spends five or six formative years of their life. As the honest answer to “what happens next” has become harder to give, it’s also become harder to feel good about being the person who recruits someone into that uncertainty in the first place. And I notice the gap most sharply when I think back to what supervision looked like when the conditions were different — which brings me to the less structural and more personal part of this.
The supervisor
There’s a less flattering part of this too, and it wouldn’t be honest to leave it out.
I am, by most reasonable descriptions, a workaholic. Not in the way people say that in job interviews to make it sound like a virtue — just genuinely, structurally unable to stop working on something before it feels finished. I have a difficult relationship with loose ends. The idea of leaving a problem in an unresolved state and going to do something else is, for me, mildly distressing in a way I’ve mostly stopped trying to explain to people who don’t share it. Many PhD students today — quite reasonably, and I’d argue rightly — maintain much clearer boundaries between their work and the rest of their lives. That’s not a generational complaint, it’s a genuine observation that this is probably healthier and more sustainable than how I operate.
But it does mean that two people can enter a supervisory relationship with completely incompatible assumptions about rhythm and pace and intensity, without either of them being wrong, and without either of them necessarily realising it until the mismatch has been accumulating for a while. That’s an uncomfortable situation for everyone involved, and one I’m not sure good intentions are sufficient to navigate.
The uncle
None of this means I’m done working with PhD students, only that I aspire to change my role. That conclusion came partly from a trip to Frankfurt earlier this year, in a long conversation with two great colleagues. We were somewhere between talking about papers and careers and the general ambient uncertainty of being at this stage of an academic life, and we arrived at a metaphor that’s stuck with me ever since: the PhD uncle.
German academic culture already has the Doktorvater and Doktormutter — supervision understood explicitly in parental terms. It’s a revealing framing, and I’ve spent enough time with it to think it’s basically right. Which is also why the uncle makes sense to me, because the uncle is a very specific and underrated role in that family structure. The uncle is not responsible for the school run. The uncle doesn’t enforce bedtimes or check homework or make sure the vegetables are eaten. What the uncle does is show up with genuine enthusiasm, get completely absorbed in whatever’s happening, contribute something real and hopefully useful, and then — crucially — hand the kids back at the end of the day. Possibly after too much pizza and cola, which is, frankly, the uncle’s prerogative. The uncle brings intensity and care within limits that everyone understands going in.
That’s honestly where I think I can contribute most effectively right now. Specific problems, defined collaborations, the kind of focused intensive work that has a natural shape and a natural end. I remain genuinely interested in that — in the ideas, in the people, in the problems. What I’m less well suited for is the sustained, multi-year, through-all-conditions support that proper doctoral supervision requires. Not because I don’t care about it, but because the match between what I can offer and what that role actually demands has become increasingly honest about itself.
The checkbox, again
From the outside, it’s a tiny thing — a binary indicator on a profile page, in a system that is otherwise not particularly good at binaries. But there’s something about small mechanisms like that. They compress a lot of reality into very little space, and the act of changing them turns out to carry more weight than it probably should.
Unticking it didn’t feel like a statement. It felt like updating a belief I’d been holding past its expiration date.
And maybe that’s the thing about decisions like this — they tend to look simple from the outside precisely because of how long it took to arrive at them.