When the heroine of Karin Bodewits¡¯ novel, You Must Be Very Intelligent: The PhD Delusion, arrives at the University of Edinburgh to start a doctorate in chemistry, she feels ¡°excited and privileged¡±, convinced that researchers are ¡°driven by the desire to make the world a better place¡±. By the time she gains her PhD, she realises that it means ¡°marginally less than a Girl Guides¡¯ camping badge¡±.

Along the way, the heroine (also called Karin) learns many sobering lessons. She soon discovers that she has been allocated neither a desk nor a computer, and her first encounter with her morose colleagues leaves her ¡°feeling like a five-year-old who has had her favourite balloon burst by laughing bullies¡±.

Karin is forced to ¡°beg and beg and beg, just to buy basic stuff for research¡±; she has to make do with ¡°a second-hand tabletop centrifuge that Marie Curie would have called an antique¡±. Her supervisor, Mark, subjects her to ¡°intense, piercing, self-dramatising¡± monologues and creates ¡°a work environment where dislike and suspicion are cooked up as efficiently as any compound in a test tube¡±. On the days after his football team has lost a match, it is always a mistake to come into work early.

Lab romances and one-night stands are rarely a good idea, the novel makes clear, but they are nevertheless inevitable, given that researchers ¡°are spending most of our [waking] lives in a small room together¡­and we are not like pandas, which can exist in a cage for years only sharing shoots of bamboo¡±.

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The novel paints a pretty bleak picture, so how faithfully does it reflect Dr Bodewits¡¯ own life?

She studied for a PhD at Edinburgh from 2007 to 2011, abandoned a possible scientific career and ¡°struggled emotionally¡± for the following year, while coordinating a research group at a university in Munich. Dr Bodewits then set up a company delivering talks and seminars about women in science, and she has often given encouragement and support to people who have been ¡°damaged¡± and ¡°psychologically broken¡± by the experience of doing a PhD.

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The novel, Dr Bodewits explained cautiously, is not directly autobiographical although it was inspired by her time in Edinburgh, and some of the characters are ¡°mixtures of real people¡±. Yet she did not write it as ¡°a revenge book¡±, but rather as ¡°a wake-up call about the power plays between supervisors and students¡±, she added.

Many universities, she went on, ¡°have BSc and MSc student satisfaction as a very high priority ¨C students are almost a bit spoiled. In contrast, PhD student satisfaction does not seem to be the focus of attention. Striking a better balance here would be good.¡±

The hiring process for academics, Dr Bodewits added, ¡°should pay more attention to whether someone is a good leader, as well as a good scientist¡±. She argued that supervisors could be sent on leadership courses, rated by students after they finish their PhDs or encouraged to ¡°pop into each other¡¯s labs to see what is happening, if people are happy or not, and why¡±.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com

Karin Bodewits¡¯ You Must Be Very Intelligent: The PhD Delusion?is published by Springer.

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