why US PhD students are fighting over food

An on-campus food pantry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison helps students with insufficient money for food.Credit: M. P. King/Wisconsin State Journal/AP/Alamy Jen Cruz’s life as a PhD student is a world away from her childhood. Although not a member of the tribe, she grew up on Yakama Indian reservation land in Wapato, Washington. Cruz, a … Read more

NIH pay raise for postdocs and PhD students could have US ripple effect

Academic workers walk a picket line at the University of California, Los Angeles.Credit: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Amid a reckoning over poor job prospects and stagnating wages for early career scientists, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it will raise the salaries of thousands of postdoctoral researchers and graduate students who … Read more

Canadian science gets biggest boost to PhD and postdoc pay in 20 years

Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau and finance minister Chrystia Freeland hold copies of the 2024 federal budget.Credit: David Kawai/Bloomberg via Getty Researchers in Canada got most of what they were hoping for in the country’s 2024 federal budget, with a big boost in postgraduate pay and more funding for research and scientific infrastructure. “We are … Read more

How we landed job interviews for professorships straight out of our PhD programmes

By staying organized in their job hunt, both authors received several job offers.Credit: Getty We met during the last year of our PhD training, after securing placements at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry for our predoctoral internships — the final step of our clinical doctoral programmes. V. R. came from the University … Read more

How two PhD students overcame the odds to snag tenure-track jobs

Researching the institutions you’re applying for can help you personalize your application.Credit: Getty Academic careers are meant to follow a set trajectory: PhD student, postdoctoral researcher, tenure-track job. But when we were thinking about what to do after our PhDs, we decided to skip the postdoc stage and go straight for tenure-track jobs owing to … Read more

How PhD assessment needs to change

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. The field of audiomics combines artificial intelligence tools with human sounds, such as a coughs, to evaluate health.Credit: Getty A machine-learning tool shows promise for detecting COVID-19 and tuberculosis from a person’s cough. While previous tools … Read more

Bring PhD assessment into the twenty-first century

Innovation in PhD education has not reached how doctoral degrees are assessed.Credit: Dan Dunkley/Science Photo Library Research and teaching in today’s universities are unrecognizable compared with what they were in the early nineteenth century, when Germany and later France gave the world the modern research doctorate. And yet significant aspects of the process of acquiring … Read more

Communication barriers for a Deaf PhD student meant risking burnout

Megan Majocha, a tumour-biology researcher in the laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says Deaf researchers shouldn’t have to spend time developing sign language for their science.Credit: NIH Sign language in science The lack of scientific terms and vocabulary in many of the world’s sign languages can make science education … Read more