Universities are failing PhD students and early-career researchers. Not because people don’t care, but because the system is set up in a way that makes it weirdly hard to do the one thing everyone claims to value: good research.

I’m not talking about the occasional bad supervisor or a single messy department. I mean the structure. The incentives. The workflows. The fact that so much of research is held together by informal knowledge, heroic effort, and people quietly burning out.

And if you’ve ever felt like you’re constantly behind even when you’re working all the time. Yeah. That’s not just you.

The quiet reality: research is treated like it happens “by magic”

A PhD is often framed as training to become an independent researcher. In practice, it’s frequently three to five years of trying to run a complex project with:

vague goals that change depending on funding, publications, and who’s in the room
inconsistent guidance (from brilliant people who are also overloaded)
admin that multiplies with every collaboration, ethics form, and reporting requirement
short contracts and funding cliffs that force you to plan your life in three-month increments

The strange part is that none of this is hidden. Everyone knows it’s hard. But we’ve normalized the chaos as if it’s a feature of “academic rigour,” rather than an operational failure.

1) The incentives are backwards

Universities get rewarded for outputs: papers, grants, rankings, completions. So the system optimizes for outputs.

But PhD students and ECRs need inputs: time, stability, mentorship, clear scope, a plan that makes sense, and a way to collaborate without drowning in overhead.

When those don’t exist, people compensate by overworking. That creates the illusion that the system is functioning, because things still get published. It just costs more than it should, often in mental health, stalled progress, and talented researchers leaving.

2) Supervision is everything… and also incredibly inconsistent

A good supervisor can make a PhD feel hard-but-doable. A bad supervisory dynamic can turn it into a slow-motion disaster.

The problem is that supervision quality varies massively, and the university often treats it as a private relationship rather than something that needs structure and support.

A lot of the pain isn’t malicious, it’s just unspoken expectations:

“What does progress look like this month?”
“What are we actually trying to prove?”
“Is this a two-week task or a six-month rabbit hole?”
“Who decides when we pivot?”
“What does ‘on track’ even mean?”

If you don’t get clarity early, you end up paying for it later with rewrites, scope creep, or entire years that feel like they evaporated.

3) Admin isn’t just annoying, it breaks momentum

There’s a kind of admin load that isn’t captured in workload models but eats researchers alive:

ethics approvals and amendments
compliance training, data governance, procurement
onboarding, lab logistics, collaboration agreements
“progress reports” that are more like performance theatre than planning

This isn’t just time-consuming. It fragments attention. Research needs long stretches of uninterrupted thinking. Most PhD students and ECRs are lucky to get that more than once a week.

4) The career pathway is treated like a secret

We all know the academic pipeline is narrow. But many PhDs are still implicitly trained as if the default outcome is a permanent academic role.

Then somewhere near the end, people are expected to magically pivot into industry, government, startups, or other paths often without support, without language to describe their skills, and sometimes with subtle stigma attached.

That mismatch breeds anxiety: you’re working toward a future that’s both intensely competitive and poorly defined.

5) The mental health conversation is stuck at the wrong level

Universities often respond with wellbeing initiatives, and some of them help. But it’s hard not to feel cynical when the environment is structurally unstable and the solution offered is “resilience training.”

You can’t self-care your way out of unclear expectations, precarious funding, and chronic overwork.

When people struggle in those conditions, it’s not a personal failing. It’s a predictable outcome.

So where does ResearchDock fit, without the “startup pitch”?

We built ResearchDock because we kept seeing the same pattern: brilliant people doing important work in systems that make basic coordination unnecessarily difficult.

Not “coordination” in the corporate sense. I mean the really human problems that quietly derail research:

nobody has a shared view of what the project is right now
decisions are made in meetings and then disappear
milestones exist, but not in a way that maps to day-to-day work
students carry invisible work that never gets counted
when someone leaves, the context leaves with them

A lot of this isn’t about intelligence or work ethic. It’s about research operations: the layer that keeps projects coherent over time.

What we’re trying to do is make it easier for research groups and programs to create:

clarity (what we’re doing, what matters, what “done” means)
continuity (why decisions were made, what changed, what we learned)
lighter reporting (progress tracking that actually helps you move forward)
less invisible work (so the same admin doesn’t get re-done by five people)

If universities fixed their structures tomorrow, tools like this would be less necessary. But right now, too many PhD students and ECRs are forced to become informal project managers on top of being researchers and they’re doing it with fragmented notes, scattered docs, and a lot of stress.

ResearchDock isn’t a replacement for good supervision, stable funding, or fair career pathways. But it can take pressure off the parts of the system that are fixable today: clarity, coordination, and keeping the research process from turning into a fog.

What I wish universities would do (and what we can do anyway)

If you’re a supervisor or research leader, the most powerful thing you can give a PhD student is not another meeting, it’s a shared workplace:

a scope that’s explicit
milestones that are real
decisions that are documented
a rhythm that protects deep work
a process that doesn’t rely on memory

If you’re a PhD student or ECR: if the system feels chaotic, you’re not imagining it. And you’re not weak for finding it hard. Research is hard. But it shouldn’t be hard in this particular way.

The tragedy is that academia loses people not because they can’t do the research, but because they can’t keep absorbing the unnecessary dysfunction around it.

And that’s the part we should stop accepting as normal.