Through our role as student representatives, the PhD Union constantly learns about the challenges that PhD students are facing at TU Graz. Our aim is to improve study conditions at the university, but it can be hard to distinguish rare from common problems, making the allocation of resources challenging.
Based on our experience and prior to this survey, the PhD Union identified themes that we deemed worth investigating more substantially, which include:

• Unrealistic publication expectations not backed by the statutes.
• High work load with an elevated risk for burnout.
• Missing feedback about the study progress.
• High teaching load, which is not sufficiently acknowledged.
• Missing internationalization including unrealistic expectations of language proficiency.
• Unpaid work prior to employment not leading to contracts.

The aim of the PhD Survey was to substantiate personal perceptions with more objective data and to create a repeatable data source owned by the students.

The full report can be found here. But we also prepared a crispy one-pager containing the most important outcomes (preview on the left-hand side).