EUA Council for Doctoral Education

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A doctorate should be independent, not isolated

27 August 2026 | Ahmet Soylu, Kristiania University of Applied Sciences

Universities cannot remove the demanding and immersive character of doctoral work entirely, but they can make sure that doctoral candidates are not left to carry isolation and uncertainty as if these were simply part of the test.

The more I have seen doctoral education from different sides, the more convinced I have become of one thing: a doctorate must be independent work, but it should not be isolated work.

Finding the right research environment for doctoral candidates to thrive

For many candidates, the doctorate can be a genuinely frustrating process.

Part of the frustration comes from the fact that it can be a lonely journey. With growing academic fragmentation, specialisation and competition, the doctoral experience is in many cases reduced to the candidate and the supervisors. That relationship is important, of course. In some cases, a strong and trusting dialogue between a supervisor and a candidate may be far better than belonging to a large but unhealthy research environment.

Still, my ideal has often been something closer to a living research environment: a professor, postdocs, several doctoral candidates, master’s students and a shared intellectual space. The doctorate would still be independent work. It has to be. But interaction, collaboration and daily exposure to others working on related problems, or simply going through similar experiences, can make the journey much less isolating.

At the same time, large research environments carry their own risks. They can become isolating in their own way, especially when hierarchy, internal competition or narrow group cultures dominate. Some candidates can also become lost or peripheral within large research environments.

So the question goes beyond whether a candidate belongs to a large research group or works more closely with one or more supervisors. The deeper question is whether the doctoral environment gives candidates enough opportunities to calibrate their thinking.

Balancing depth, relevance and freedom to explore in the doctorate

This calibration is crucial. A doctorate cannot merely scratch the surface. It must go deep enough to make a genuine contribution. Usually, superficiality is detected relatively quickly. It becomes visible in supervision meetings, seminars, paper reviews, or in the candidate’s own sense that the work remains too general.

The opposite problem is harder to detect. A candidate may start digging with a needle: deeper and deeper into an increasingly narrow point. From the outside, this can look like rigour and depth. But at some point, the work may become so narrow, so meticulous, and so detached from larger questions that the broader contribution begins to disappear.

I probably belonged more to the first category myself. My challenge was often curiosity itself. Broad interests can make one scratch too many surfaces at once. That can also be a strength, as long as one is aware of it and knows when to act on it. Doctoral education should provide help with this. Not by removing independence, but by helping candidates understand their own intellectual tendencies: when to stop, when to step back, when to look broadly and when to focus again.

They need depth, but they also need movement. They need the freedom to wander between theory and practice, between disciplinary precision and real-world relevance, between specialised detail and the larger question of why the work matters.

But this kind of intellectual movement cannot always be scheduled neatly into fixed working hours. It takes time, space and a form of immersion that institutions must take seriously. This is also why we need to be honest about time.

Why work-life balance isn’t that simple for doctoral candidates

Is a doctorate, or academic work more generally, a nine-to-five job?

In a formal sense, in many countries, a doctorate is now an employment relationship. And that matters. Candidates need the protections, rights, salary, benefits and boundaries that come with employment. We should not romanticise exploitation, unpaid overtime, or the idea that suffering is somehow proof of academic seriousness. But the process itself is not a job in the narrow sense. It is inherently more immersive than that.

I remember dinners where my name was called, and I would suddenly realise that I had not really been present. I remember activities that were supposed to be relaxing or fun, but where my mind was still somewhere inside the thesis. At times, it cost more than I had expected. A doctoral project occupies the background of your thoughts. It does not always respect the neat borders between work and private life.

Some candidates may manage this with great discipline. They may work systematically, protect their evenings and organise the doctorate almost like a regular job. That may be possible, and even healthy, in some cases. But it would be unfair to place the entire burden of managing this tension on the candidate.

If doctoral education is immersive by nature, then institutions must give candidates the support, time and space that such work requires. This is why I worry when we rush candidates through tightly framed three-year trajectories while also pretending that the process can always respect ordinary work-life boundaries. We cannot demand originality, depth, international quality, publication, coursework, collaboration, relevance and personal balance all at once, without recognising the pressure this creates.

More than supervision: creating other forms of doctoral community

We should also remember what doctoral education is meant to produce: not only a thesis, but a researcher who knows how to think independently, tolerate uncertainty and find their way out of the jungle.

Across many institutions, whether small or large, disciplinary or interdisciplinary, the classic large research environment remains difficult to establish around every doctoral candidate. Not every candidate will have several peers working on closely related topics. Not every field has the scale, structure or resources to provide a strong local community.

But then the institutional responsibility becomes even greater.

If we cannot always provide the classic research group environment, we must deliberately create other forms of doctoral community. Work-in-progress seminars, cross-programme candidate forums, shared spaces, writing groups, methodological workshops and structured peer feedback are real necessities, rather than cosmetic additions.

These are ways of providing some of the intellectual and social functions that a strong research environment would otherwise offer. But these activities only work if both institutions and candidates believe in them, and if they are kept alive and systematic. Perhaps this is one of the most important responsibilities of a doctoral environment: to give candidates more than supervision. They need intellectual companionship, structured feedback, time to think and room to move between depth and breadth.

This article was first published in Norwegian on Universitetsavisa.