Recently, someone asked me a deceptively simple question: What made you feel that this book needed to be written?
I had to think about it. There was no single moment when I sat down and decided that the world urgently needed another book about academia. The idea emerged much more slowly, through conversations that kept repeating themselves.
Over the years, as a professor, supervisor, and coordinator of a doctoral school, I found myself discussing the same questions with PhD students and early-career researchers.
How important is the choice of supervisor? Should I spend time abroad? Which conferences are actually worth attending? When should I start thinking about grants? How do I gradually build a scientific identity that is recognisably my own rather than simply an extension of my supervisor's work?
And, eventually, the most difficult question of all: Do I really want to stay in academia?
None of these questions is particularly exotic. What struck me was something else: They were often being asked too late.
The conversations we leave to chance
Research careers involve a layer of knowledge that is rarely taught systematically.
How does academic recruitment actually work? Why can international mobility matter so much? How do professional networks develop? When does a young researcher need to begin demonstrating scientific independence? What role do timing, institutional priorities and funding availability play in opportunities that, from the outside, may appear to depend entirely on merit?
Most experienced academics know something about these things. We learned them ourselves, eventually. The problem is that we still largely expect the next generation to learn them in much the same way.
Some researchers are fortunate. They find a supervisor who not only teaches excellent science but also explains how the profession works, introduces them to the right people, encourages them to go abroad at the right moment and helps them understand which opportunities are worth pursuing. Others, equally talented, do not. That began to trouble me.
When career knowledge becomes a question of fairness
If two equally capable doctoral researchers receive radically different career preparation simply because one happened to meet a particularly engaged or well-connected supervisor, we have a problem that goes beyond mentoring. It becomes a question of fairness.
Merit matters enormously in research, and it should. But merit can only express itself fully when people have reasonable access to the information they need to make good decisions.
Knowing that a particular fellowship must be planned a year in advance, that a conference may matter as much for the conversations in the corridor as for the presentation itself, or that scientific independence must be built gradually rather than declared at the end of a postdoc may sound like small pieces of advice.
At the right moment, however, they can alter a career.
I gradually became convinced that we should not leave access to this knowledge entirely to luck.
From conversations to a book
My first response was not to write a book, but to organise the ideas. I wanted to have more structured conversations with my own doctoral students about the parts of research careers that rarely appear in doctoral programmes. I began collecting questions, examples and lessons accumulated over many years inside universities.
The more I organised them, the more I realised how much there was to discuss.
Choosing a PhD and a supervisor. Publishing. Conferences and networking. International mobility. Scientific identity. Funding. Recruitment. Academic systems in different countries. But also a question that gradually became central to the book: when does continuing towards an academic career still make sense, and when might another direction offer a better future?
Those notes gradually became seminars and the seminars gradually became a manuscript.
Eventually, that manuscript became “What No One Tells You About Academic Careers: A Realistic Guide to PhD, Research, and Becoming an Academic.”
I wanted it to be the conversation I wished every young researcher could have early enough in their career: realistic without being discouraging, practical without pretending that there is a formula for success.
From academic careers to research careers
One of the themes that emerged while writing the book became increasingly important to me: understanding academic careers also means understanding that academia is only one possible destination.
Many doctoral candidates begin their PhD imagining a future in academia, although only a minority will eventually obtain permanent academic positions. The book therefore does not simply ask how to build an academic career. It also asks a more uncomfortable question: When does continuing towards one still make sense, and when might another direction offer a better future?
A PhD develops skills that travel well beyond universities: analysing complex problems, managing long-term projects, communicating ideas, working with uncertainty, learning quickly and collaborating with people from different backgrounds. The same is true of activities we often think of as specifically “academic”. Building a professional network, attending conferences, spending time abroad and developing collaborations do not simply strengthen an academic CV. They expose young researchers to people, organisations and possibilities they might never otherwise encounter.
And perhaps this is the real point. A well-developed research career should gradually make us more open to opportunities, not more attached to a predetermined destination. An interesting opportunity may arise in another university, but it may just as naturally come from a company, a research centre, a public institution or somewhere we had never originally imagined working.
The goal, then, should be neither to prepare doctoral students to stay in academia nor to persuade them to leave it. It should be to help them build a strong, open professional profile, and the confidence to recognise a good opportunity when it appears.
A book that started new conversations
Since the book was published, something encouraging has happened: the conversations that inspired it have begun to multiply.
Doctoral students and colleagues have shared their own experiences with me, raising new questions. Discussions about supervision made me think more carefully about how much responsibility universities place on individual supervisors. Conversations about academic careers increasingly led to careers beyond academia.
Now I am trying to bring these ideas more systematically into doctoral training, beginning with seminars for doctoral schools at my own university. The ambition is not to provide young researchers with answers to every career question. It is much simpler: to give them a map early enough to recognise opportunities, ask better questions and make more informed choices.
Perhaps that is the most unexpected thing I have learned from writing “What No One Tells You About Academic Careers”.
Sometimes a book does not close a conversation.
It simply gives the conversation somewhere new to begin.