For this new series of collaborative blog posts, early career researchers (ECRs) in French history in the UK were invited to reflect on their recent experiences. In autumn 2025, the situation across UK universities looks increasingly bleak, with more than a hundred separate redundancy schemes or cuts underway by one tally. In this context, the already challenging position of ECR researchers has grown much worse very quickly and perhaps more quickly than other colleagues realise. When so many of us feel powerless in the face of the structural problems facing universities, there is value in sharing experiences and drawing attention to practical things that institutions and senior colleagues can do to help ECRs in our fields. There is value, too, in giving ECRs opportunities to express their frustration in ways that they cannot in conversation with colleagues upon whom they might depend for their next job, reference, or other assistance.
The contributors include men and women, ranging from PhD students to postdocs and come from a range of institutions. None of them are employed on open-ended contracts. Their words have not been edited or blended together, but are presented as anonymised, numbered contributors. The contributors and numbers are not the same in every post.
This is the third and final post, following a first post on what it’s like being an ECR in 2025, and the second post about what colleagues and institutions can do to support ECRs. In this final post, we asked ECRs what advice they would give to current or potential PhD students in French history.
Contributor 1:
When it is time for my students to choose a topic for their PhDs, I warn them of the influence of fashions on the academic job market. At the same time, perhaps idealistically, I still tell them to choose a topic that they love and that they find interesting and important.
Fashions are ephemeral; passion, academic discipline and hard work are not.
Contributor 2:
I would give five pieces of advice:
- If you can do something else, do not do this. If you want to continue studying French history, or history in general, because this is something that you have enjoyed thus far, think about which elements of the discipline that you have enjoyed that you can find elsewhere. If you like the analytical side of taking information and tearing it apart to make an argument, think about law. If you like the research side of things, collecting and gathering information, think about policy jobs or think tank work. If you love working in foreign languages or travelling to different places, think about NGO work.
- If you want to follow this path because you have got good marks at university level and that makes you feel good, please do not. Firstly, because the constant reassurance, gold stars and hand holding tend to dry up after the first year of a PhD. Secondly, because wanting to continue with what you know and what you think you have been good at so far is a terrible way to make a life decision. Think about why you think you want to go into further studies. And for the love of God, DO NOT PAY FOR THIS. Do not take out a loan for a PhD. Do not allow yourself to make such a poor financial investment. You may be telling yourself that you will be the exception. You won’t be.
- Know when to leave. I can think of three historians who would not be classified as early career on paper, who have to scramble for jobs every year and are never employed on contracts for more than a year. All three are men in their late 40s. They have also all been teaching in their current university for around a decade, applying for permanent jobs that come up there and failing to land them. But they feel they have no choice but to stay, waiting in their current one-year position and embodying the sunk cost fallacy. These men should have gone elsewhere years ago. Your loyalty will not be rewarded. The university is not going to love you back.
- Every job application that you submit before you have completed your PhD will be rejected. Nobody is going to hire you for a lecturer position when you are in your third or fourth year of PhD. The job spec may say that they will accept applications from PhDs who have almost finished. This is a lie. They won’t, unless your viva is next week. You’ll be competing for this job with people who finished two years before you. Applying for jobs when you are more than a few weeks from your viva is a waste of your time.
Nobody else will tell you this, which means you’ll apply for jobs throughout the final year of your PhD, jobs that you would never have landed in a million years, and feel chewed up and spat out by the job market before you’re even ready to start.
Having said all this, a PhD can be a useful opportunity…
Know how to make this work for you. If you are smart, a PhD can be a chance to have four years of funding that can open up your life. Travel the world, learn new languages, live in different places, develop new skills, write a book that you’re proud of, and build up a portfolio that could take you in a different direction. If you’re reading this, you’re a French historian. Use this as a chance to spend an extended period of time in the Francophone world. Think about the skills that you could develop over these four years that could allow you to explore different job opportunities. Write a policy paper or try different research methods. Sit on a beach for two months. Move to Dakar.
There is opportunity in these four years, if you know where to look.
In all the doom and gloom around the academy, if can be easy to overlook that most postgraduate jobs for young people are just as unstable, poorly paid, and depressing. At least with a funded PhD you are guaranteed a low but steady income for three/four years, far more freedom than in most jobs, and someone to be checking in on you regularly. Try to think about the opportunities and freedoms this could afford you.
How can you get what you want out of this?
Contributor 3:
To those considering starting a doctoral degree, my most important piece of advice is to NOT do so under the assumption that you will be able to have an academic career afterwards.
Only go through with it if you are okay – really okay – with the idea of doing the doctorate for its own sake, as a period of a few years during which you are able to have intellectual freedom and devote yourself to your personal development and to exploring a topic you’re passionate about (and you must really be passionate about it to put up with the often gruelling conditions that come along with doing a PhD, especially when you are approaching thirty and seeing all your friends who didn’t do one be able to go on lavish holidays, buy houses and start families while you are stressing over your completely uncertain future and whether you can afford a monthly takeaway). Actually, do not expect that a history PhD will help you get any job — academia-adjacent fields like archival work or museum careers will often require their own highly specialised qualifications, and jobs completely unrelated to academy will often see your PhD as a hindrance rather than an asset, as you will frequently be seen as overqualified and not practically minded enough.
Additionally, if at all possible, you should talk to current doctoral students about the realities of their daily lives so you can get a better sense of whether you would actually enjoy pursuing a PhD. Yes, the intellectual and personal freedom offered by it is unmatched, but most people face very real obstacles that significantly reduce their quality of life during the degree, including absent or unsupportive supervisors, economic hardship, poverty and squalid living conditions, a complete lack of security regarding one’s own future, and the huge challenges of managing a giant, very complicated project on your own, usually with very few externally imposed deadlines, and, resulting from that, very serious problems with time management and work-life-balance as you are essentially always and never on the clock. There are very good reasons why most PhD students in the UK have mental health problems, and why most of us consider clinical depression and anxiety the norm among our colleagues (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03761-3).
To other ECRs, I have four pieces of advice.
First, if you are (very understandably!) struggling with your mental health and can at all afford it, get yourself a therapist. I have seen this make a huge difference for so many people. You deserve to get the help you need. Check with your university’s counselling service as many offer free appointments, as well as with the NHS which offers accessible free counselling in some areas. If that isn’t available to you search the internet for therapists who offer “sliding scale payments”, or look for training institutes such as The Association of Jungian Analysts, the Centre For Freudian Analysis & Research (CFAR), the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, or the Psychosynthesis Trust where recent graduates and trainee psychotherapists offer free or very cheap sessions.
Second, if you are still in the middle of your PhD, use your time wisely. It can be tempting to volunteer for a million different activities as it may seem that you have tons of time before the end of your degree, but that time passes very quickly and you should use it in the ways that will likely benefit you the most once it’s time to hit the job market. Focus on writing the best thesis you can first and foremost, on publishing (quality over quantity; ideally aim to publish one excellent article that works as an introduction to what you are trying to do with your thesis as a whole in a prestigious journal, if possible one aimed at historians generally, rather than only at scholars in your own narrow field), and on getting some teaching experience. If you have time to spare after that, then go to a conference or two to add that to your CV and meet people in your field. Those are the core things to prioritise, everything else is nice but tends to be less important.
Third, apply for as much funding as you can, both for research trips and for conference attendance. Besides the obvious benefit, this has the added value of signalling to future employers that you are able to win competitive grants, which will give you an advantage over applicants who have not proven that they are able to do so.
Finally, if you are entering the job market or already on it, think very hard about what you are willing to tolerate and at what point it might be time for you to get out. It is cruel and unfair and beyond heartbreaking to have to leave academia after spending so many years pursuing a career in it, but it may be better to leave and try out a different career path than to find yourself in your mid-thirties, five years after graduating from your PhD, sharing a dodgy student house with six undergraduates, writing your fiftieth job application this year and only ever getting offered part-time or below-minimum-wage positions limited to a few months at a time (this is a real example).
Ultimately this decision is very subjective and only you yourself can know what you are willing and able to put up with before giving up on academia and trying your luck at some other job, but the important thing is that you do think about it. Don’t waste years of your life without stopping to ask yourself periodically if the sacrifices you are making in pursuit of an academic career are still worth it. Check in with yourself, be honest, don’t fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, and know that leaving a sinking ship isn’t giving up, it’s doing what is necessary to save your life.
Contributor 4:
There are various truisms about approaching an academic career.
Casting yourself widely and creatively, being realistic about the academic landscape, and having a back-up plan if it doesn’t work out are all important points that bear repeating. My own, more specific piece of advice probably won’t apply to everyone but has been helpful to me, and might also help those engaging in solitary research, such as a PhD or a research postdoc. That is to cultivate a wide social network that you interact with on a regular basis. This does not necessarily mean a group of scholars working on the same thing, or even a network in the sense of ‘networking’ in order to further your professional career, although both are obviously important too.
Rather it is the more mundane point of having someone with whom you can grab a coffee; someone with whom you can chat about your day and vent/joke/commiserate with as appropriate. I think after covid most of us experienced some kind of shrinking of our social circles, and lost touch especially with the more tenuously connected satellites of our working lives. Yet as a researcher working alone, these connections must be purposefully cultivated and sought out. The ‘watercooler conversation’ of more typical workplaces does not emerge so naturally in the library or the archive, and not at all in the home office. I’m sure this won’t appeal to everyone, and no doubt there are some for whom the phrase ‘watercooler conversation’ provokes immediate horror. Nonetheless, I recall a colleague who would tend to shy away from any suggestion of a coffee break, not wishing to distract from their working day. However, if you did happen to catch them in the corridor and start chatting, they could easily stand there and talk for two hours. On some level, I think they needed the social interaction.
