Last year, Nature’s careers team spoke to five recent PhD students in North America, Israel and the United Kingdom to understand how disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, had affected their career plans. At the time, these students expressed anxiety about their prospects as they prepared to enter the job market — citing concerns around substantial cuts to US scientific funding, the war in Gaza and lingering delays to PhD projects caused by the pandemic — but also a strong desire to remain in science.
Class of 2025: five PhD students reveal realigned priorities in wake of COVID and cuts
Now, to get a better sense of the global forces shaping the decisions of recent PhD students, Nature has cast a wider net, inviting people in Australia, South Korea, Germany, South Africa and China to share their career journeys. Five students explain how the shadow of COVID-19 continues to shape their careers, and how the chaos of US President Donald Trump’s second administration has reverberated across academia, disrupting plans and shifting priorities far beyond the United States. Still, these students remain optimistic about their prospects, with several pursuing opportunities abroad before they return to their home countries to build careers and, ultimately, support those of other early-career researchers.
YUNHEE KIM: Supporting Korea’s next generation
Will earn her PhD in stem-cell and cancer biology in August from Seoul National University in South Korea.
I started my PhD in stem-cell and cancer biology about six years ago at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, but, in 2022, my adviser moved to Seoul National University, and I followed him there. Fortunately, the impacts of COVID-19 were not as serious in South Korea as they were in other countries because we didn’t have a heavy lockdown. And because I was living on campus, I was free to go to the laboratory. It would have been disastrous if things had been different. There was a mandatory two-week quarantine for people who became ill, and back then I had to culture stem cells and change their medium every day at the same time. Just one day of delayed experiments would have set me back by six months.
I started studying cancer because I have many family members who have had it. I think immunotherapy is one of the most powerful treatments, but the response rate varies among people, and so I’m looking at the differences between people who do and don’t respond. Why is it that certain tumours do not respond to immunotherapy, and is there a way to alter this type of cancer by changing the tumour microenvironment so that it is more similar to that of someone who does respond?
Are these the happiest PhD students in the world?
I only have one semester left before I graduate. I’m excited because it’s been seven years since I started to discuss this project with my adviser as an undergraduate student. When I first joined his lab, I was not used to reading and writing in English, so it was hard to even read articles to learn more. I’m proud to see the results, after years of struggling.
In my field, clinical translation is important, and so I was interested in exploring how my work can be turned into a real therapy. But because the underlying mechanism is more interesting to me, I decided to do postdoctoral basic research instead. I’d like to go abroad, ideally to the United States, because many of the big names in my field are there and there is a better culture of working with clinicians than there is in Korea. I’d also like to experience a different culture.
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